It’s that time of the year when information technology leaders sit down and reflect on the past year and predict what trends will dominate in 2019. Next year, advanced technologies will lead to shifting job roles, the increasing importance of data governance, and the continued evolution of the data lake.
To kick-off the New Year, business leaders across industries put their heads together to identify the most impactful data trends shaping 2019. With technology rapidly evolving and defining the future of business, it’s important for IT leaders and decision-makers to look at the top data trends driving organizational success, performance, innovation, and competitive advantage.
We see first-hand how our customers gain a competitive edge by turning their data into actionable insights that can improve business outcomes and transform organizational processes. To help keep your company from falling behind, we’ve rounded up everything you need to know about hot topics in data heading into 2019, from carry-over trends to new predictions to keep your eye on.
Let’s dive in.
1. Advanced Data Management Technologies Shift Job Roles
The greatest value of data no longer lies within the IT department but instead rests on the shoulders of business users across various departments. These varied teams want a unified understanding of their most important operational and business challenges.
The proliferation of integrated platforms, as well as the advancement of data management tools, allow data consumers to understand, manage and use data quickly and simply through self-service solutions, enabling IT to focus on higher-value data management projects.
2. Dark Data is on the Move
There is still a massive amount of unused dark data just waiting to be transformed into digital assets that organizations can use. The reason dark data remains unused is because it is often unstructured.
Unstructured data is typically hard for data management tools to read, making it difficult to categorize and impossible to analyze without converting into a different format. Businesses will start strengthening decisions by digitizing and migrating analog databases to take advantage of cloud-based predictive analytics.
3. The Barrage of Data Worsens
More data is created and distributed throughout many different processes and systems on a daily basis. However, because of this data barrage, organizations are still plagued with data challenges in managing their data.
In 2019, organizations will need centralized data management technologies to manage distributed data environments and deliver business users transparency into their data supply chain. Consumers now demand a new data experience, just as they would shop online for retail products. They want to easily and quickly search, locate, understand and leverage data they can trust.
4. Data Lakes Evolve
In 2019, organizations will shift from viewing data as a static resource to data in motion. Now businesses will require support for more than HDFS and require the ability to process additional data sources like S3.
Cost and the ability to scale elastically are driving on-premise Hadoop systems to transition to cloud-hosting architectures.
5. Data Governance is Becoming More and More Important
After the implementation of GDPR in 2018, many businesses quickly advanced their data governance programs. However, this didn’t translate to a better understanding of data and new analytical insights. On the positive side, different lines of businesses were able to foster open communication.
As a result, companies are ready to broaden their data governance program and shift their focus beyond just governing data. In 2019, businesses will introduce governance to analytical models, so they can aggregate the metadata around their models to ensure all teams have a complete understanding of their data and can leverage it for insights.
6. The Chief Data Officer is Still on the Rise
Managing data is now a team effort. To create strategies and build a data-driven culture, C-suite executives and senior leaders need to work together.
Whether CDO, CIO, or CTO, leaders must fully participate to leverage data as a competitive advantage. Businesses who fail to collaborate across diverging lines of business will not keep up in 2019.
7. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Privacy for Regulations
Since the GDPR deadline has passed, the frenzy is over. Many businesses feel that they’ve likely done enough to avoid the massive potential fines associated with noncompliance but remain unhappy with the solution they rushed to implement.
They question whether their “quick fix†approach really covered every GDPR requirement or will serve their needs in the long run. Other businesses are still struggling to meet basic compliance demands. Adding to the issue are similar regulations for the U.S. and Canada. Canada is attempting to adjust its data protection law while keeping GDPR’s standards top-of-mind.
California passed the Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. In 2020, businesses will need to disclose personal information at the request of a customer. Organizations that aren’t already compliant with GDPR will need to get on board in 2019 to avoid future fines and penalties.
The bottom line is, IT departments are no longer the only function responsible for managing and leveraging data. Business users now require a better understanding of their data environments and assets in order to leverage them effectively for both day-to-day operations and for a long-term strategy.
As more data is generated, organizations will find it increasingly difficult to take advantage of using data as an enterprise asset. With the shift in roles in the workplace, leaders must come together in 2019 to implement effective data strategies to maximize data value for innovation and growth.