As the custodian of your organisation’s technology and data strategies, your role as a CIO or IT Manager has never been more critical.
Data is at the centre of everything an organisation does today and powers the insights that drive what it should do tomorrow. To thrive and grow, organisations need to capture, analyse, predict, present, use, and report data with a high level of agility.
When other departments approach IT with functional requirements or a challenge, there are usually three paths to take:
- Buy an off-the-shelf “Point-Solution”, which is functionally fit for purpose but requires integration to other point solutions to drive real impact.
- Custom develop the software from scratch, which potentially provides high functional fit, but at a high cost and over long periods.
- Finally, to consider the best of both approaches above through “Platform”
Buying something off the shelf may solve a pain point quickly, but often creates long- and far-reaching complications in terms of extensibility, integration, management, maintenance, support, and skills development and retention. Adding more applications, multiple point solutions, onboarding additional vendors, and increasing licensing across the organisation won’t contribute to efficiency or productivity.
When one builds an application from scratch, every single question needs to have an answer, and the answer will determine a choice and a path to follow, which may or may not be the correct path in the long run when the business needs to change.
With Platform, you begin with a long list of answers and then configure and build the application as you need, using tools that are well-considered and designed to handle any questions and challenges.
Dataverse provides a central foundation that allows data to be integrated and consolidated from multiple sources into a single store, which can be used in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Teams, SharePoint, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents and provides a highly secure, scalable and extendible cloud-based storage option for your data. It is a true data platform on which multiple business applications can be implemented and developed using common tooling, security, workflow, reporting, and extension through API, shortening application development and turnaround times, while driving down the total cost of ownership, and proving ROI.
Read the full article here or Download the CIO’s Guide to the Dataverse to get an in-depth understanding of the Data Platform Architecture.