How to maintain your big data analytics software Posted on : Oct 09 - 2019

Keep your big data software current with carefully planned management. It will help your company's investment live a longer, more productive life.

When a company buys or subscribes to an analytics solution, keeping the work current can be a challenge. But maintaining that software is key to helping it enjoy a long, useful life.

For example, if you use analytics to assess financial portfolio risk factors brought on by climate change, political unrest, etc., risks will continue to rise and decline. Analytics software has to be adjusted to account for these variations. When these adjustments are made, it can affect the other systems and business operations that engage with the software.

This is where IT (and the company) should have a soft maintenance process defined for big data and analytics, just as it has a software maintenance function in place for transactional systems and systems of record.

Unfortunately, how to maintain big data analytics software in production is still a work in progress for many companies.

In some cases, maintenance of these programs isn't emphasized because organizations already feel they have it covered in the process of developing analytics. They know that as they're testing their software, they're going to keep changing data and algorithms until they reach a point where the analytics are producing the insights the company expects. This is also when you place the software into production to support decision making and other business processes.

But what if the analytics and the big data running in production can no longer provide adequate insights because of changes in business or the world? This is where "old fashioned" software maintenance enters in—and where IT has to play an important role. View More