Leverage data for a competitive advantage

While the world progresses at a rapid pace with technological developments in robotics, complete autonomous systems, and digital transformation of products and processes, it is data that fuels this change.

Big data, which was a buzz word until a few years ago, has itself metamorphised into what Gartner has recently defined as ‘small and wide data’ that would ensure exploiting data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to its fullest. However, amidst all the upward trending curves, the one thing that we should as an industry take notice of is how only ~30% of enterprises have invested in data and its related initiatives globally.

We have collated four key trends that we believe will have a significant focus as more and more organisations leverage data to their competitive advantage.

Open data sharing

Given the criticality of data and its accessibility for the success of analytics, AI and other initiatives, we are starting to see open data sharing being strongly pushed for by regulatory agencies and governments. For example, open banking, this will bring a step change in innovation, business opportunities for organisations to enter new markets and eliminating data monopolies. Organisations, however, do need to start placing additional emphasis on data quality, data management processes and creating inter-operable standards.

Cloud and Edge Analytics

Provisioning access to massive volumes of data at scale and being able to act on it as quickly as possible will fuel the need for enterprises to adopt cloud journeys – whether that is single, multi or hybrid cloud approaches as well as edge computing. As business functions unearth more and more problems to be solved by data teams, the need to fix problems and deploy continuous improvement at increasingly faster time scales will move data analytics to the point where data is initially collected from devices and sensors rather than on traditional data warehouses and data lakes.

Low/No-code AI

With AI seeing an explosive growth and interest across industries, one of the factors that has also restricted its adoption is the complexity of techniques that help build robust AI solutions. Low/No-code AI, though it has been around for a while, will see increased traction as it not only solves the complexities of writing thousands of lines of code, but it also helps mitigating the challenges of dealing with the shortage of skilled resources in the global market.

Data Governance

An aspect of data that is often ignored and underfunded is data governance. Fundamentally, it means assigning ownership and stewardship responsibilities, managing policies and compliance, creating the right level of oversight to make effective decisions in the most expedient way, improving data quality and most importantly protecting customer’s data rights. With tighter regulations and increased scrutiny on enterprises using their data, we see an increased rigor around formalising data collection practices, managing data quality, increased data awareness and accountability to all involved stakeholders.

In a nutshell, though there are multiple other areas of interest across data & analytics that could be leveraged by organisations to drive value out of data, we strongly believe these four will be pivotal in accelerating the journey towards reaping maximum benefits without leading to increased costs.

We help clients with their data strategy, build data platforms to deliver better decisions and actions and help them run their existing reporting & analytical services efficiently. If you would like to get in touch, please contact us on bd@gemserv.com