At last month’s Gartner Data & Analytics (D&A) Summit in Orlando, Gartner analysts predicted that “managing consequent and persistent uncertainty and volatility will be a key focus for data and analytics (D&A) leaders in 2022.”1
Yet, despite all the vendor technology we saw at the conference — and all the money companies have spent on D&A over time — most people still make business decisions using intuition, not data.
Clearly, something isn’t working. And something needs to change. Here are five key takeaways from the event that every D&A leader can use to chart a more clear, swift and outcome-oriented path forward — regardless of your starting point:
1. Data and analytics workloads continue to move to the cloud.
As the analytics capabilities offered by big cloud providers continue to advance, Gartner advises clients to consider abandoning best-of-breed solutions in favor of standardizing on a single cloud platform. While this approach can make architectural patterns like data lakehouses much more effective, the native capabilities offered by any given cloud provider may not be the ideal ones for your use case, and it’s often still a complex undertaking to integrate components — even those from the same vendor. Additionally, many companies still maintain on-premises operations, and many utilize multiple cloud providers.
What you can do —
Begin to consolidate cloud storage, but choose analytics pipeline components from vendors who can bridge on-premises and cloud, who meet your unique analytics and application requirements, and who continually innovate. For example, Incorta effectively bridges on-premises and cloud data with our Data Agent technology, and we’re unmatched in accelerating both query speeds and time-to-value for business application data.
2. Data and analytics is entering an era of composability and reuse.
Gartner has been preaching the benefits of “composability” for a few years now. But virtually no one I spoke with at the conference knew exactly what it meant or how they might implement it. From a practical standpoint, prebuilt functionality and interoperability have always been a good idea — for data analytics, this means prepackaged analytics content and data interoperability to feed multiple workloads or even a data mesh. A few analytics vendors are starting to offer prebuilt components like new chart types, simple data flows, computations and presets. However, for customers with ERP, data layer and CRM analytics needs, the complexity needed to go from raw tables to finished dashboards makes it difficult to reuse off-the-shelf content built for traditional data pipelines.
What you can do —
Composability can start at any level. For instance, how can your organization better reuse common data sources, metric definitions, and semantics between technical and non-technical data consumers? (See below info on data mesh for a hint.) From Incorta, our prebuilt Data Applications distill insights from our customers and partners into packages easily installed from our in-product marketplace. In addition, Incorta’s unique technology allows us to offer complete, data-to-dashboard flows that can slash as much as 80% of the work typically required to deliver BI from complex applications like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce. Soon, we’ll also add visual and non-visual application components to the marketplace that allow for highly customized user experiences built with our Component SDK and with open-standards technology like JavaScript and React.
3. More enterprises are choosing to develop low-code and no-code applications.
Gartner reports that use of low-code and no-code application platforms is expected to skyrocket, with up to 50% of organizations having one or more projects underway in 2023. At the Summit, we heard from customers that want to create purpose-built applications that can help streamline the decision-making of people in transactional roles.
What you can do —
A large population of workers will never benefit from self-service, ad hoc analytics and dashboards — no matter how much they’re augmented with AI technology. For these people, custom applications that incorporate data, analytics and data science into a purpose-built user interface are the best way to increase data-informed decision making. At Incorta, we’ve always embraced a low-code/no-code approach to D&A with approachable pipeline tools and easy-to-learn dashboards and query tools. In addition, our Component SDK offers highly customizable experiences, and we’re looking into ways to move beyond dashboards and into supporting low-code application platforms.
4. Everyone is talking about data mesh.
While Gartner continues to press the concept of “data fabric” — which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to generate reusable data catalogs — attendees flocked to any presentation or vendor booth that included the words “data mesh.” Data mesh is an organizational architecture that puts business subject matter experts (SMEs) at the center of data stewardship. The idea is to create cross-functional teams of data engineers and business experts in order to reduce friction and more agilely create more usable analytics and insights.
What you can do —
A key tenet of data mesh is to retain original data forms, so different stakeholders with different workloads (reporting, analytics, data science) can all leverage a consistent source of data, and avoid duplication and rework. The Incorta analytics platform maintains all original data and delivers analytics and datasets for data science very rapidly, without extensive data engineering. This means distributed teams can all access the same data — data centrally governed and secured by IT — and capture reusable data patterns as business views and dashboards to allow business teams to easily promote and share their best insights.
5. Shift from a D&A strategy to a business strategy infused with D&A.
Gartner implored data and analytics leaders to move beyond narrow D&A strategies and instead evolve their thinking toward helping line-of-business leaders create smarter, business-focused strategies backed by rich insights and analyses.
What you can do —
At Incorta we’ve always been about creating better business outcomes. Incorta’s speed and agility lead to data empowerment, which leads to data curiosity, which leads to informed decision making.
Incorta: Real-time analytics on raw business data
Organizations that use Incorta routinely go from raw data to insights in only days, and tell us the value they receive in terms of business agility and creating a culture of data curiosity simply can’t be replicated with any other platform. In fact, it was really fun to watch the shocked reactions of CIOs attending the Gartner D&A Summit when we talked about how you can use Incorta to deploy an Oracle EBS or other “known” analytics use case in only 6-10 weeks.
That’s because, with Incorta, months-long BI projects to prepare data are a thing of the past. And transactions are available for immediate analysis to support on-demand, root cause questions — no other analytics platform can conduct on-demand analysis at this level.
That’s why only Incorta can help you finally enjoy the short project cycles and true, self-service operational analytics your business needs to effectively compete and succeed in today’s world.
Ready to see for yourself? Spin up a free trial today or register for one of our upcoming virtual hands-on labs.
1 Gartner, “Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2022 Orlando: Day 1 Highlights.” Aug. 22, 2022.