For many Australian businesses, harnessing data is the key to anticipating customer needs and market shifts, uncovering hidden trends and having the intelligence to know when to develop new products and services. This is critical to stay a step ahead of competitors and deliver superior customer service.

Data is critical at every organisational level. It enables businesses to innovate and better manage operational costs. And with boards focussed on ESG targets and other critical metrics, timely access to accurate data is essential.

The challenge is that data is typically held in disconnected silos. For some, the general ledger and accounts system is the single source of truth for the business. For others, the customer relationship management (CRM) system is the most critical. And then there’s HR, website logs and potentially dozens of other repositories of data.

When we only look at one or two of these systems we don’t get the full picture of what is possible. And if that’s the case, opportunities are missed. When we want to solve business problems, we need to arm people with the best possible information, from the widest possible sources.

The challenge for most businesses is not a lack of good data. Businesses are often hamstrung because access to data is limited by systems that aren’t designed to share their data. When data is scattered across multiple sources they struggle to move from being data rich to becoming insight rich.

Business users have been burned over the last 20 years by the promise of data warehousing and analytics projects that have fallen short of the promises made by technology and the expectations of what they were told was possible. Instead of being able to access and use data from many sources, they were limited to the sources that could be most easily accessed. And if a new data source was needed, it could take weeks or months for it to be added.

Legacy data analytics platforms were created with a central assumption. Data needed to be extracted from the original data source and then transformed to fit into a new database. That process was costly to create, took lots of time and was inflexible. It had no chance of meeting the demands of today’s fast-paced business world.

Fortunately, a new breed of data analytics tools are coming to the fore that are unencumbered by the thinking of the past. These new tools harness metadata – which is information about data. For example, there may be some data held in a CRM system. Metadata tells us the location of data in the CRM, what security is applied to it and its structure. Then, an intelligent software layer uses metadata from multiple sources to bring it together in a way that makes it usable to analytics tools.

The actual data is never extracted, transformed or loaded into another system. This saves time, complexity and cost, and makes it almost instantly accessible. And adding new data sources is a matter of telling the software layer, called a networked data platform, about the new data using its metadata. Business users can leverage fast insights without lots of costly software development.

Businesses that gain access to their data, regardless where it is located, can discover things they never knew before. Correlations that were opaque become clear. Insights that were impossible to see suddenly become possible, enabling new ideas to flourish and foster innovation. not large companies that eat the small. It’s the smartest that leap past the slow. Making the best decisions relies on having the fastest access to data.