Outsourced Data Teams Service Best!

This article appears in our Q4 2021 issue of Finance Transformation Magazine. To download the issue, click here

Gary Cole, CEO of Lumilinks, is challenging organisations to outsource their Data Management to Lumilinks rather than hire their own teams. Gary explains the benefits outsourcing Data Management delivers as he describes how Lumilinks offers Data as a Service!

In 2002, Computer Weekly published the article ‘Time to outsource data storage’ yet nearly 20 years on, organisations are still slow adopting the Digital Revolution, to their own demise. Lumilinks on the other hand are at the forefront of the Digital Revolution and constantly pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking.

To the world of Finance Transformation and Shared Services where effective Data Management Strategy drives business critical outputs we are posing the question “Is it best to outsource your data team?” Based on our experience we believe the answer is yes and here’s why.

Lumilinks are illuminating business insights for organisations by providing data as a service. By making a fully integrated team of highly skilled data scientists and analysts available to organisations, we’re enabling businesses to save hundreds of thousands of pounds annually. All whilst providing a best-of-breed analytics service.

We save you money on recruitment, onboarding, training, management time, technology, and salaries. We have a fully functioning best in class team good to go and we offer this to you as a service, which will save you both time and money. The Digital Revolution has created a world of Big Data, Chief Data Officers and Data Scientists and this is a daunting prospect to many organisations. We take away the worry by providing a portal to such talent.

Our team of highly skilled data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and statisticians are partnering with our clients to shine a light on the wealth of information they have available, both internally and externally. However, the challenge many organisations face is that this information is not easily available to them.

The two main reasons this wealth of information is not being effectively mined by the organisation is that they don’t know how to access the external market data and they don’t possess an effective Data Warehouse as the bedrock of their internal Data Management.

Lumilinks appreciates the value a Data Warehouse brings in ensuring the security, reliability, robustness and accessibility of an organisations critical data. We believe creating a Data Warehouse is an effective first step in moving to an Outsourced Data Management model. It ensures that the baseline of all Data Management, Analytics and Insights is validated and secure.

We build bespoke Data Warehouses which consolidate all your organisation’s data sources into one single source of truth. In addition, Lumilinks can effectively enrich it with data available in the marketplace on competitors, suppliers, market conditions, etc. So, what is a Data Warehouse?

Think of a Data Warehouse as a daily newspaper that has been vigorously fact-checked and designed to answer all the questions its readers may ask. It provides you with up-to-date information on all the key events from the previous day.

A Data Warehouse allows users to extract both internal and external information at low computational costs, while facilitating a shift away from what is typically seen as a siloed view of data. By creating a Data Warehouse, we can ensure that data is easily queried, digestible, and useful to business users, whatever their skill set.

Many organisations are constrained by the high costs associated with Data Warehouse development. Not to mention the scarcity of complex skills required. However, Lumilinks are lowering the barriers around cost and skills by addressing theses challenges as an outsourced service.

Data Outsourcing Benefits

1. Experts on tap – Outsourcing provides access to experts including analysts, compliance specialists, data engineers and statisticians, providing you access to a fully integrated team of specialists. You don’t need to employ a world class Data Scientist of your own, we already have one!

2. One version of the truth – Unify all company data across multi-cloud and on-premises repositories in real-time, allowing business users to share analytics and reports with a select group of viewers within the company.

By enriching your existing data with external sources and creating a managed Data Warehouse we can build visual dashboards, allowing you to deliver data in a digestible way in the boardroom!

3. Real-time analytics – Users can create complex data models and visualise key metrics to uncover hidden connections and correlations between variables. Using built-in machine learning and AI users can gain deeper insights into data models and tools such as BI software can enable users to access the data within the warehouse.

4. Flexibility – Outsourcing your data team allows you to expand and contract in areas of analytics as necessary, with access to full-time engineers while building your data infrastructure and the option to scale back once projects are complete. This flexible solution will suit any enterprise, regardless of its size, with various pricing models also allowing you to tailor computing and storage resources to your needs.

5. Chief Data Officer – While the role of Chief Data Officer is still in its infancy, its mission has shifted from risk mitigation to creating business value with data assets. Gartner predicts that by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset, and analytics as an essential competency. By 2023 we will see data literacy become an explicit and necessary driver of business value and will be formally included in over 80% of data and analytics strategies and change management program. We can support your CDO to deliver on these challenges more effectively.

Outsourcing Data teams enables seamless and cost-effective business transformation, not to mention the opportunity you have to tap into the minds of data experts, without the need to hire.

So, if you are serious about creating a leading Data Management capability to drive your Business forward, then Lumilinks Data as a Service is the answer!

About the author: Gary Cole

Gary Cole founded Lumilinks in 2019 alongside Jo Dudley-Smith and Dr Tim Drye who is a former DataIQ Data Scientist of the Year. On a mission to disrupt the traditional SaaS status quo, Lumilinks offer analytics as a service using A.I. decision-making models to empower users to identify the optimum route to goal, helping organisations to efficiently and strategically achieve their business objectives.