IT leaders and new challenges with complex business data

IT leaders face continued new challenges with ever-changing and complex business Data

My name is Adrian Evans and I am the founder of a technology specialist, IT consultancy, data management and reporting AI solutions based business in the North West of the United Kingdom.

Technologist holding degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering and software engineering I am also Microsoft certified.

As one of the UK’s leading technology specialists with 20 years’ experience in business working with clients from diverse sectors including FinTech and solving some extremely complex and challenging issues with enterprise data and reporting; my experience is both varied and unique.

During the years working with my clients I have adopted a very hands on approach talking through different options and concepts to enable the most efficient and cost effective resolution of difficult tasks.

In some instances I have been approached because companies own vast IT departments have been unable to solve specific or complex reporting requirements and needed a specialist with advanced specialist tools to get the job done.

The most frequent requests from clients are to produce high level management information reports (MI) on data assets required for the evaluation of important financial indicators that business directors and managers need to make critical business decisions.

A number of clients I have helped in the FinTech sector have had similar issues with the data captured by the 3^rd party software solutions often being tricky to report on and analyse because of the nature of the data also being a mixture of different formats.

Standard out of the box reporting solutions by some of the market leaders struggled to work with this mixed data and schema limiting the information that could be presented in management reports to business leaders and so unique approaches and implementations were required using our own custom reporting tools.

Data stored as a mixture of relational and hierarchical needs a two pronged approach with standard querying using SQL and then XQuery to access elements of the XML stored in the database. This data then needs to be aggregated or knitted together with certain hooks in the data to produce reports with performance indicators, statistics and management information.

By taking the time to understand the importance and value of client data assets, and more importantly, how to interpret and monetize that data that is certainly the best approach to help businesses increase value and reach their objectives in a much shorter period of time.

Adaptability is also important as each data set is unique to each client and therefore requires a different perspective every time and an understanding of what the client wants from their data.

Often clients are completely unaware of the importance and value of some of the data they may have in their possession or how to analyse, extract and report on the data. This could be customer data or their own marketing data which can be used and leveraged to their own business gain with the potential to increase business profitability.

One common thing that has become apparent with a lot of the clients I have worked with over the years is the disarray of different data formats and types with often important and mission critical data often being stored in Microsoft Access databases, spreadsheets and other disjointed formats. This presents a number of problems for businesses who want to maintain a certain level of compatibility for the sharing of data and content but also need to consolidate and report on their mixed data assets.

The areas I have consulted on frequently gave me some valuable insights into areas of client data hence the reason for developing new software tools to assist me with my work of managing and reporting on client data assets and improving the important help I provide to businesses.

By using our own specialist tools Indigo DQM / DRS developed over the years as a result of the problems I have encountered I have been able to provide services and solutions to clients with very complex reporting requirements that had previously remained unsolved.

When dealing with new challenges it is always best to keep an open mind and of course learning new technology and adapting to rapidly changing business ensures you can stay at the top of your game in demanding and dynamic environments.

Adrian Evans BEng BSC MCP MCSA

CIO / CTO AJE Consulting, www.ajeconsulting.co.uk

Indigo DQM Data Management Systems, www.indigodqm.com