In today’s landscape, customer experience is the new competitive advantage – and customer experience means digital experience. Large organisations need to be able to adapt and act responsively, leveraging technological advances in order to actively compete with the constant influx of young, nimble, companies that are eager to dominate the market.
The challenge for many is modernisation; companies must rapidly develop new capabilities to better support the business while working with legacy systems and outdated tools. It all starts with a plan.
Planning the Modernisation Journey
It’s not about simply upgrading existing systems. Instead, organisations should take an enterprise-wide approach to updating legacy applications within a scalable cloud environment. Naturally, many organisations are dependent upon legacy systems and the services they provide, but simply lifting and shifting these applications to the Cloud will only deliver short-lived efficiencies. While many organisations declare ‘mission accomplished’ after a ‘lift & shift’ into the Cloud, this is only the first step. Opportunity for future growth and development remains.
True modernisation is like building a dynamic jigsaw puzzle; each component of the existing tech stack is broken down, assessed, and then reshaped to fit into its place in the new Cloud environment. The reshaping required for recent digital solutions within the enterprise may be minor in comparison to more drastic measures needed for legacy systems, such as a rebuild or replacement.
Creating a Single View
Single View is an emerging standard approach that enables a rapid start to modernisation journeys. Single View creates an aggregated and consistent 360° view of an organisation’s data drawn across business units and systems. Offering immediate business value and improved customer experience, Single View provides powerful data visualisations relating to everything from customers to products. The Single View dashboard provides organisations with a greater understanding of customer behaviour and business operations, driving better decision-making and, ultimately, building a stronger, more competitive future. While the advantages of creating a Single View are clear, the steps to realise this goal are not and often Single View languishes as a mere aspiration in the pantheon of an organisation’s failed IT initiatives.
Challenges and How MongoDB and gravity9 Can Help
While there are multiple challenges to implementing Single View, the sheer scale and complexity of data in an organisation is a critical factor. Gathering such data from disparate, siloed systems and legacy relational databases further complicates the process.
A Document Database such as MongoDB, however, is designed specifically for large scale variable data and contains the flexibility to store data without a predefined schema. Enterprise Scalability in MongoDB is possible through native sharding capability, which essentially spreads the data and process loads across multiple nodes so that the data is centralised logically but distributed physically. This sharding capability, alongside flexible schemas, allows for the storage of information from many systems at a granular level and the ability to access it at speed— a benefit often difficult to achieve with more traditional Relational Database technologies.
MongoDB Atlas now offers extended data platform capabilities that complement Single View, such as Lucene-powered with Search, native data visualisation with Charts, and the capability to span and sync to mobile devices with Realm. Last but not least, smart tiering is available with Online Archive.
At gravity9, we leverage our partnership with MongoDB to use this powerful technology as a cornerstone of our Single View modernisation approach. We know that data ownership, standardisation and timeliness are critical to ensuring a positive customer experience. The stronger the data, the better we are able to tailor our solution to the specific challenges and objectives of an organisation.
At gravity9 we believe no two Single View solutions are the same as no two customers are the same. We customise solutions to individual challenges by utilising event driven architecture to support standardisation, controlling data access and patterns through microservice design, and ensuring the support of legacy systems through digital de-coupling, thereby creating user-led solutions that deliver accessible, intuitive, insightful data via a single interface.
Embracing Single View as a part of a modernisation program can be a challenge, but with the right partner who is able to fully understand your organisational needs, provide proven methodologies, and utilise the best possible technology solutions, Single View doesn’t have to be an aspiration, it can be a reality.