Data readiness

for AI
A practical guide for preparing your data,
regardless of your starting point
Contents

01
Getting started 4
Adopting the right mindset

02
Data readiness level one 5
Emerging: Introducing data fundamentals

03
Data readiness level two 6
Developing: Setting up your data to deliver insights

04
Data readiness level three 7
Proficient: Maturing your data practices

05
Data readiness level four 8
Advanced: Finessing your data approach

06
What’s next? 9
Advance your data strategy with Unisys

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 3
The foundation of reshaping
your business with artificial
intelligence (AI) is built upon a
fundamental element – data.

The quality of data opens the gateway Is your data ready for AI? Explore this
to AI’s full potential, transforming your guide to assess your organization’s level
organization by automating processes of data readiness. You’ll find four key
and informing decision-making. It sparks stages – evolving, developing, proficient
product and service innovation while or advanced – and the steps you can take
revealing opportunities to save significant at each stage to propel your initiatives.
time and money. Harness your data’s potential and realize
the full transformative benefits of AI.
To ensure the success of AI models, your
data must be accurate, diverse, accessible,
rich, actionable and high quality. Miss
the mark on data quality, and you risk
bias creeping into your models or losing
efficiency and accuracy.

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 4
Getting started
Adopting the right mindset
Before plunging into these data readiness steps,
consider the powerful combination of data and AI.
The AI and data connection is undeniable. Without
data, AI can’t detect patterns and relationships that
help it achieve its ultimate potential. Data is used to
train your AI models. Via visualization capabilities,
AI can generate insights that are easy to understand
and act on.

AI tools and technologies are more accessible than

ever to organizations of all sizes. This makes it the
perfect time to commit to getting your data AI-ready.
Doing so requires a data mindset that aligns your AI
initiatives with your business objectives.

Data rules to thrive by:

Treasure your data – it’s one of

your most important assets!
A data-driven culture and
mindset can accelerate your
data readiness journey
Your data contains a multitude
of business-enhancing insights
Giving employees self-service
access to data can result in
huge payoffs
Your AI success will only be as
good as your data quality

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 5
 Five steps for emerging data
organizations

Data readiness level one 1

Define objectives:
Start by pinpointing the business challenges that,
when resolved, add the most value. Prioritize these
Emerging: Introducing data high-impact use cases and set clear, achievable
goals for your AI projects.
fundamentals
Collect data:
Organizations in the earliest stage of data readiness are
at level one – emerging. You likely store your data in data 2 The first step in optimizing your data is compiling
a comprehensive inventory. This means gathering
warehouses. As you move into elastic computing and
all available data in a central repository. This
the cloud, your focus will evolve to make sense of and
process might be ad hoc at this stage, focusing on
optimize your unstructured data and infuse it across assembling the data from various sources before
applications. You are probably driven by your eagerness organizing it.
to benefit from all that AI has to offer this shift. At this
stage, you should primarily focus on fundamental steps Clean data:
to advance your data strategy. 3 As you gather your data, you’ll likely discover data
that’s outdated, inaccurate or otherwise flawed,
reducing its overall usefulness. Data cleaning
enables you to repair or remove problematic data,
whether incomplete, inaccurate, corrupt, duplicated
or improperly formatted. Remember that data
cleansing is not always a standard procedure and
may vary depending on the issues encountered.

Store and manage data:

4 Once cleaned, your data becomes valuable to
many people across your organization. Implement
straightforward methods for data storage so it’s
accessible to employees. Establishing effective data
management practices is also key to maintaining
the integrity and usefulness of this data.

Train team members:

5 Maintaining the quality of your data hinges on having
a well-trained team. Educate your employees in
advanced data management practices beyond
basic data preparation skills. A true data-driven
culture empowers everyone in the organization to
learn data analytics skills.

What if you lack in-house talent?

The talent shortage and strained resources can challenge
your efforts toward data readiness, even with training.
A technology partner like Unisys can help you on your
journey by guiding you with our data science expertise.

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 6
 Five steps for emerging data
organizations

Data readiness level two 1

Integrate data:
Data comes from a variety of sources, including
internal business systems, public datasets and
Developing: Setting up your data to third-party sources. Integrating all your data from
disparate sources increases the value of the
deliver insights
insights extracted.
After satisfying the fundamentals and adopting good
Transform data:
data hygiene practices, organizations move to level
two –developing. You’ll have a much better grasp of
2 Basic data transformation techniques can prepare
your data for future stages. These techniques
data preparation but still have room for growth. At
include organizing data, converting data formats
this stage, you must take the next critical steps to and structures, and mapping and translation.
advance your AI strategy by further preparing your
Select features:
3
data for optimal use by AI.
This stage offers a good opportunity to identify the
relevant features you require from data solutions.

Explore data:
4 To extract insights from your data, lay a foundation
with a basic exploratory analysis. This gives
you deep knowledge of raw datasets and an
understanding of your data structure.

Partition data:
5 Data splitting is a machine learning feature that
separates data into two subsets for training and
testing. At this stage, you may not completely
optimize your data.

How can you extract insights from

your data?
The Unisys Data Analytics solution helps you turn your data
into business insights with data analysis using statistical
models, machine learning algorithms and AI technologies,
and robust, intuitive visualization tools and reporting.

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 7
 Five steps for emerging data
organizations

Data readiness level three 1

Establish data governance:
Well-defined data governance policies are critical to
comply with the myriad of data privacy regulations
Proficient: Maturing your data around the world. Automating this process makes it
easier to comply with these regulations.
practices
Scale your data infrastructure:
Proficient organizations have made incredible strides in
data readiness. If your organization is in this category, 2 Migrating data from legacy systems to cloud-native
databases vastly increases your data handling
it is striving to advance beyond data warehouses and
capacity and improves performance. This migration
data lakes to something even better. After all, AI models
is essential for scaling up your infrastructure,
require structured and unstructured data – and plenty ensuring it can efficiently manage and process
of both – to be successful. You recognize the need to larger volumes of data.
take steps to keep your data secure and scalable.
Improve collaboration and communication:
3 Making the most of your data takes effective
teamwork across departments, which means
reliable collaboration and communication
technology. Knock down silos that keep people
divided and encourage employees to base
decisions on data.

Monitor and update continuously:

4 Regular data monitoring alerts you to any
duplications and inaccuracies. This proactive
approach allows for timely updates and early
detection of issues and helps to maintain the quality
of your data.

Implement a data lakehouse:

5 Data lakehouses combine the best features of data
lakes and data warehouses to store hybrid data. To
improve your organization’s data management and
analysis, begin incorporating a data lakehouse. This
involves structuring a scalable storage solution that
allows for both big data storage and sophisticated
analytics.

How do you migrate and modernize

your data?
The Unisys Data Migration and Modernization solution
enables you to scale resources on demand, simplifying
IT management and making it easier to keep up with
business demands.

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 8
 Five steps for emerging data
organizations

Data readiness level four 1

Boost data quality:
To feed AI with high-quality data, implement
comprehensive standardization across all datasets
Advanced: Finessing your data and assess data quality in a more detailed way than
previous assessment efforts.
approach
Implement advanced data procedures:
Organizations at the advanced stage actively employ
best practices and cutting-edge approaches to data 2 These measures include establishing robust
benchmarking and baseline models, implementing
preparation. Those in this category, which is especially
innovative techniques to manage imbalanced
common among B2C businesses such as financial
datasets, using refined data augmentation methods
services, have built a strong data foundation. At and introducing sophisticated feature engineering
this stage, you should offer continuous learning and practices. At this stage, you should also implement
advanced training in data practices to your team and a fully automated and efficient data pipeline so data
consistently seek ways to enhance data quality. moves through your organization smoothly.

Tighten data security:

3 Robust security protocols are critical to protect
data privacy and confidentiality and ensure you
comply with industry and regulatory standards
like HIPAA, PCI and GDPR. These strong cloud
security measures should include policies, controls,
procedures and technologies to protect your cloud-
based systems, data and infrastructure.

Document and manage metadata:

4 Your data has data. Metadata management
involves evaluating, updating and storing it while
comprehensive documentation tracks it all.

Govern and evolve your data lakehouse:

5 Establish robust governance frameworks to
strengthen data lakehouse performance further.
These should be tailored to the data lakehouse,
ensuring quality, compliance and efficient use of this
architecture. Be ready to continuously adapt and
optimize the data lakehouse to meet emerging data
needs and technological advancements.

How do you manage your data?

The Unisys Modern Data Engineering solution offers cost-
effective and scalable data management when using cloud
platforms like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Unisys | Data readiness for AI — A practical guide for preparing your data, regardless of your starting point 9
What’s next?
Advance your data strategy with Unisys

Your future success with AI depends on an effective data strategy. Regardless of where you are
on your data journey, Unisys can be your strategic partner, offering specialized expertise and
technology solutions. Trust us to evaluate your data landscape, assess your stage of readiness
and ensure that you’re gaining valuable insights from your data.

Learn more about how Unisys can help advance your data and analytics strategy and
approach to AI.

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