The 5 key take aways of the Gartner Data & Analytics Conference

Take away 1: Top Trends for Data & Analytics in 2023 divided in 3 themes

In today’s fast-paced and data-driven world, organizations are increasingly recognizing the transformative potential of data and analytics (D&A). However, to truly unlock its value, it is essential to adopt a holistic approach that encompasses three major themes: thinking like a business, embracing ecosystems, and never forgetting the human element. Let’s dive in.

Think like a business

D&A can deliver the most value when it acts as a business rather than a supporting business function:

• Be proactive not reactive.
• D&A as a product to be “sold” to the rest of the organization.
• Owning responsibility for D&A assets and outcomes.
• Balancing cost of delivery with the value delivered.

From platforms to ecosystems

D&A ecosystems recognize the connectivity of not just technical platforms, but the broader role and connectivity of D&A:

• Increasingly comprehensive and integrated end-to-end architectures make adding new capabilities less costly.
• Better understanding and sharing of resources and capabilities enables greater value to be created.
• Integration of D&A into the organization and societal ecosystem has broad and diverse impact.

Don’t forget the humans

D&A is sometimes seen as an effort to remove the human elements from decision making. A balanced view of D&A requires:

• Driving adoption of D&A by working with business users to ensure accessibility, trust and relevance to business users.
• Recognizing human involvement across the range of decision making, from decision support to decision setting the context for decision automation.
• Ensuring D&A deployments consider multiple aspects of risk.

Take away 2: High demand is focused on 6 new emerging technologies

In today’s data-driven world, the demand for data and analytics has reached unprecedented heights, with a particular focus on these six cutting-edge emerging technologies:

1. Data Fabric: is a technology pattern that delivers the data foundations through unified data access and driven by active metadata to automate data management tasks. It acts as an intelligent orchestration engine.
2. Active Metadata: is continuous analysis of all types of metadata to determine alignment and deviations between “data as designed” and “actual operational experience”.
3. Lakehouse: is an architecture that combines a mature Data Warehouse with the more recent Data Lake on the same data platform.
4. Data Observability: The ability to understand the health of an organization’s data, pipelines, landscape& infrastructure by continuously monitoring, tracking, alerting, analysing and troubleshooting problems to reduce and prevent data errors or downtime.
5. Data Mesh: is an architectural approach and operating model driven by federated governance.
6. FinOps: Financial Operations (FinOps) applies the traditional DevOps concepts of agility, continuous integration and deployment, and end user feedback to financial governance, budgeting and cost optimization efforts.

Take away 3: D&A is at the core of the digital transformation

By 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, up from less than 40% in 2021.

By following these recommendations and focusing on the best practices outlined, your organization can build a robust and future-proof cloud D&A strategy. Embracing proven best practices and focusing on certain areas will position you for success in leveraging the transformative potential of the cloud in your data and analytics journey. So take note of the following:

Take away 4: The D&A ecosystem will evolve into an integrated cohesive (cloud) platform

The evolution of the data and analytics ecosystem into an integrated cohesive (cloud) platform offers exciting prospects for organizations seeking to unlock the full potential of their data assets. These figures show that if organizations can learn to navigate the evolving landscape, they can harness the transformative power of integrated cloud data platforms.

• By 2024, enterprises that primarily build applications leveraging a D&A ecosystem from a single cloud service provider will outperform competitors, despite vendor lock in.
• By 2024, 50% of new system deployments in the cloud will be based on a cohesive cloud data ecosystem rather than on manually integrated point solutions.
• Through 2025, powerhouse cloud ecosystems will consolidate the vendor landscape by 30% leaving customers with fewer choices and less control of their software destiny.

Take away 5: Generative AI (like ChatGPT) is here to improve productivity

It would be an understatement to claim that AI is a big hype in 2023 (and probably for the next years to come). However, vigilance is needed to mitigate the risk areas, such as trust, fairness, privacy, security and safety. The following list can get you in the right headspace to think about your own (and your company’s) approach toward a world built with AI:

• The future of All work will be AI-transformed.
• Imagine the impact for all roles in the organization starting with D&A.
• Assess and plan for the impact on skills and new roles.
• Assess and plan for changes to governance.

Need more than 5 key takeaways to tap into the transformative potential of data and analytics?

Direct your questions to our D&A specialists and let’s see if we can navigate the evolving landscape together.