Data and Analytics Predictions and Priorities for 2020
Joe Caserta and Doug Laney discussed their data and analytics predictions and priorities for 2020 in InformationAge.
We are at a pivotal point in the evolution of how we use data. With unprecedented technologies and new ways of harnessing and capturing the data that exists around all us, it is our responsibility to leverage that data in a timely and efficient way that improves lives and increases business value.
In the predictions below, learn how organisations will take strategic steps to become fully data and analytics-driven throughout 2020.
Prediction 1: Data spiders will come to fruition in a significant way
Starting in 2020, organisations will implement technology that sits in their corporate environment that will be able to scour their entire environment, locate all databases and datasets, and identify all of the enterprise’s information assets.
Early arrivals in this field include Modak Analytics, Manta, Global IDs, and Integris, but the number of providers is expected to grow throughout 2020. The ability to manage and monetise information is predicated on understanding the complete information portfolio, not only inside the organisation, but also throughout the extended business ecosystem.
Prediction 2: Bots will build data pipelines
Currently, we manually join data across different data sources and manually identify patterns to come up with business insights. In 2020, businesses will start to train machines to interpret dataset structures and infer ways to integrate them virtually and/or physically. Then, bots will automatically build data integration and analytics pipelines with nominal human intervention.
Recently, corporate IT departments, overwhelmed with the variety of data sources, have succumbed to building one-off data integration solutions for functionally-specific analytic needs. Or, they’ve resolved to dump data into unarchitected data lakes, leaving the integration later on to those using the data. ETL tool vendors soon will recognise and take advantage of the opportunity to plug this hole in the market with intelligent, dynamic enterprise data integration capabilities.
Prediction 3: Artificial intelligence will automatically unify data
The greatest opportunity for data and analytics solution providers is to help organisations overcome the data literacy challenge. Such solutions would offer the ability of less data literate users to ask complex business questions and have data identified, integrated, and analysed on demand.
With the maturity of AI, machines can learn which data can be unified with other data to provide predictions and prescriptive advice. Doing so will not only be efficient, but will help prevent human error in selecting the wrong data and integrating it improperly. This development has already started happening with tools like Tamr and Kinetica, but will continue to mature throughout 2020.
