2018 Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends – Part 2
If you have not seen the first three Business Intelligence Trends for 2018 click here!
4 – The Debate for Multi-Cloud
The Debate for Multi-Cloud Rages On
If your organization is exploring and evaluating a multi-cloud strategy in 2018, you’re not alone.
“There’s a stampede of organizations moving their data to the cloud and moving their core applications,” said Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat. “And whether it’s a ‘lift and shift’ or a re-platforming, we see customers adopting the cloud at a much faster rate than ever.”
According to a recent Gartner study, “a multi-cloud strategy will become the common strategy for 70 percent of enterprises by 2019, up from less than 10 percent today.” Customers are growing sensitive about being locked into a single legacy software solution that doesn’t match their future needs. However, switch and migrations have become relatively easier with similar APIs and the use of open standards like Linux, Postgres, MySQL, and others.
It’s likely your organization is also evaluating how data centers are designed and run. Your IT department is evaluating hosting environments based on risk, complexity, speed and cost—all factors that increase the difficulty in finding one, single solution for your organization’s needs.
Evaluating and implementing a multi-cloud environment can help determine who provides the best performance and support for your situation. According to the Boston Herald, GE re-aligned its cloud hosting strategy to leverage both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, with the intention to understand the best performing hosting environment and see which contract provides the lowest cost to pass to their customers.
But the multi-cloud trend doesn’t come without a healthy awareness of the merits and challenges of moving to this type of environment. While flexibility is a plus, a multi-cloud environment increases overhead cost from splitting your organization’s workloads across multiple providers. And a multi-cloud environment forces an internal developer team to learn multiple platforms and have additional governance processes in place, depending on the different environments they have to support.
Additionally, a multi-cloud strategy could potentially diminish the buying power of a company or organization. If a company is splitting what they buy across multiple providers, it will hurt their volume discounts. This creates a model where a company is buying less at a worse price.
Surveys and stats, such as the Gartner data-point above, indicate multi-cloud adoption is on the rise. However, it doesn’t indicate how much of a given platform was adopted. In many multi-cloud cases, organizations are using one provider for most of their needs and very little for others. But most of these use cases fall on implementing a second cloud hosting environment as a backup in case of incompetency or failure of the main cloud hosting environment.
While the rise of multi-cloud adoption in 2018 is on the rise, organizations will have to maneuver through the nuance of assessing whether their strategy measures how much of each cloud platform was adopted, internal usage, and the workload demands and implementation costs.
5 – Rise of the CDO
Rise of the Chief Data Officer
Data and analytics are becoming core to every organization. That is undebatable. As organizations evolve, they’re prioritizing a new level of strategic focus and accountability regarding their analytics.
Historically, most business intelligence efforts were assigned to the Chief Information Officer (CIO), who oversaw standardizing, consolidating, and governing data assets across the organization, which needed consistent reporting. This put BI initiatives (data governance, building analytical models, etc.) in competition with other strategic initiatives (such as IT architecture, system security, or network strategy) under the purview of the CIO—and often inhibited the success and impact of BI.
In some cases, a gap between the CIO and the business has formed due to speed to insight versus security and governance of the data. So to derive actionable insights from data through analytics investments, organizations are increasingly realizing the need for accountability in the C-Suite to create a culture of analytics. For a growing number of organizations, the answer is appointing a Chief Data Officer (CDO) or Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) to lead business process change, overcome cultural barriers, and communicate the value of analytics at all levels of the organization. This allows the CIO to have a more strategic focus on things such as data security.
The fact that CDO’s and/or CAO’s are being appointed and assigned accountability for business impact and improved outcomes, also demonstrates the strategic value of data and analytics in modern organizations. There is now a proactive conversation at the C-level about how to deploy an analytics strategy. Instead of waiting for requests for a particular report, CDO’s are asking, “How can we anticipate or quickly adapt to business requests?”
To best facilitate a highly effective team under this C-level position, organizations are dedicating more money and resources. According to Gartner, 80 percent of large enterprises will have a CDO office fully implemented by 2020. Currently, the average number of employees in the office is 38, but 66 percent of organizations surveyed expect that the allocated budget for the office will grow.
Josh Parenteau, Tableau’s Market Intelligence Director, notes that the role of the CDO is “outcome focused.” He states that “it’s not just about putting data into a data warehouse and hopefully someone uses it—they’re there to define what the use is and make sure that you’re getting value.” This outcome focus is critical, especially as it aligns with the top three objectives in Gartner’s 2016 CDO survey, which include greater customer intimacy, an increased competitive advantage, and an improvement in efficiency. These objectives are fueling companies like Wells Fargo, IBM, Aetna, and Ancestry to implement CDOs with the intent to take their data strategy to the next level, making the role of Chief Data Officer a business staple in 2018.
6 – Crowdsourced Governance
The Future of Data Governance is Crowdsourced
The modern business intelligence outfit has progressed from data and content lockdowns to the empowerment of business users everywhere to use trusted, governed data for insights. And as people are learning to use data in more situations, their input on better governance models has become a monumental force within organizations.
It’s an understatement to say that self-service analytics has disrupted the world of business intelligence. The paradigm shifted to anyone having the capacity to create analytics leading to the asking and answering of critical questions across the organization. The same disruption is happening with governance. As self-service analytics expands, a funnel of valuable perspectives and information begins to inspire new and innovative ways to implement governance.
Governance is as much about using the wisdom of the crowd to get the right data to the right person as it is locking down the data from the wrong person.
For the business user, the last responsibility they want is the security of the data. Good governance policies allow the business user to ask and answer questions, while allowing them to find the data they need, when they need it.
BI and analytics strategies will embrace the modern governance model: IT departments and data engineers will curate and prepare trusted data sources, and as self-service is mainstreamed, end users will have the freedom to explore data that is trusted and secure. Top-down processes that only address IT control will be discarded in favor of a collaborative development process combining the talents of IT and end users. Together, they will identify the data that is most important to govern and create rules and processes that maximize the business value of analytics without compromising security.
(To be continued…)
Fonte: Tableau
