Three Focal Points for Data Analytics in 2021
How do data and analytics leaders prepare for 2021? Here are the three trends to focus on.
Last year took disruption to a new level. It’s not necessarily news that enterprises are disrupting and modernizing their data analytics strategies, adopting technology and tools that enable them to harness data from a growing number of data sources and glean actionable insights. Now add to the mix a global pandemic — the ultimate disruption. As companies try to adapt, the demand for data and insights has increased at warp speed.
Now more than ever, stakeholders need to know what is happening in a business operationally, how the business is performing, and how events are affecting the level of customer service. Access to quality data analytics can help ensure that an enterprise stays strong during — and after — COVID-19. After the uncertainty and seismic market shifts of 2020, how do data and analytics leaders even begin to prepare for 2021? Here are the three trends they should focus on as we begin the new year.
Prior to the pandemic, modernizing a data environment was a steady and deliberate process driven by IT and data teams. They prepared and planned how to ensure faster time to insights within their data infrastructure while working to keep disruption to existing business processes to a minimum. COVID-19 shook things up and accelerated the need to modernize, while simultaneously wreaking havoc on budgets and resources.
With this urgency and fewer resources for IT and data teams, data democratization and self-service have become an imperative. Now, enterprises need to provide data and the means to transform data to more business users to help them rapidly solve business problems inside their departments. IT can no longer be a bottleneck if businesses hope to use data to make timely, fact-based decisions. Both IT and business stakeholders need cloud-native solutions that are intuitive and enable easy onboarding for new users.
No data democratization can exist without a strong data governance policy that allows data access to business users while still meeting the security and compliance requirements of the enterprise.
With the explosion of data sources and data inside large enterprises, data teams simply can’t move fast enough. According to a recent IDG Research MarketPulse survey, enterprises spend nearly half of their time (45 percent) wrangling and preparing data. It takes about a week to prepare data for a typical analytics project. As a result, 97 percent of enterprises surveyed are looking for ways to speed up the data transformation process to accelerate analytics-ready insight.
