3 Ways to Keep Data Flexible and Available for Optimal Services

When plans go awry, flexibility becomes all the more important – both for yourself and your data.

The pandemic has certainly veered plans off course. Increasingly, state and local agencies have no choice but to move data to modern infrastructures so they can quickly make trustworthy, data-backed decisions. However, they face major challenges, such as the exponential growth in data, the proliferation of out-of-sync data silos and changing organizational needs.

“Agencies need the ability to take friction and complexity out of the process of making timely, relevant data available where and when it’s needed, so they can provide better services in a cost-effective manner,” said Andy Shore, Vice President of Sales, Public Sector at Qlik, a data integration and analytics platform.

To streamline and accelerate delivering robust insights and better services, agencies should look for these capabilities:

1. A flexible choice on platforms

As government organizations continue migrating to the cloud, they should look for multi-cloud support capabilities providing the flexibility to choose the optimal platform for each targeted workload. Deep engineering-level relationships with the leading cloud platform providers allows Qlik to provide agencies the most optimized, analytics-ready data at their fingertips.

“We want agencies to use the right platform for the task at hand,” Shore said.

2. Automated integration to eliminate silos

When data is siloed in individual applications, it’s nearly impossible to perform analytics that can improve services and optimize mission performance.

With automated integration capabilities, organizations can consolidate the data trapped in these silos by accelerating migration to the cloud, modern data warehouses and data lakes. This migration provides the cost-reduction, agility and innovation required to close the gaps between data, insights and action. It allows organizations to sync data across applications and platforms, while making that data available and consumable wherever it’s needed to enable better decisions and outcomes.

“We bring a comprehensive and coordinated set of tools that make the data integration process simple, and we automate the process so that what used to be feared can now be embraced,” said Scott Morris, Qlik’s West Coast Field Sales Director for Public Sector. Qlik ensures success at every step of the data pipeline from data modeling and real-time ingestion to data marts and governance – making trusted, actionable data available throughout the organization.

And automation means agencies can save precious human resources. “Agencies do not have to retrain people because automation provides the ability to quickly design, create, load and update data warehouses without manual coding.” said Lewis Perry, Qlik’s East Region Field Sales Director.

3. Synchronization of analytics-ready data to meet changing needs

As agencies’ business needs change, their data structures must be able to change as well. Data models need to be created or imported, then modified and enhanced iteratively. This allows agencies to meet evolving needs and stay business-centric.

“Qlik’s integration platform provides this flexibility. It also enables quick migration to the cloud while keeping the data in sync with on-prem systems,” Morris said.

This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent guide, “Resilience Lessons From State & Local Government.” Download the full guide here.