Global regulations
Data managers have been focused on meeting compliance mandates for many years now, and this will only accelerate in the year ahead. “Organizations are scrambling to get ready for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is scheduled to go into effect in May 2018,” said Jitesh Ghai, senior VP and general manager of data governance and data quality at Informatica. “We know GDPR introduces new challenges around data and privacy, but what may be surprising is that this also brings potential for new opportunities resulting from the strategic treatment, and effective use, of data in an organization.” At the same time, Ghai continued, “traditional approaches to data management won’t be able to meet the requirements of next-generation use cases. GDPR is an opportunity for organizations to take a holistic and strategic approach to governance and compliance across the enterprise to effectively discover and catalog, govern, protect, and master data. This new approach to data management will require the application of AI and machine learning to discover, understand, and manage enterprise data as a strategic asset.”
Agile practices
The same pressures that gave rise to Agile and DevOps in software development are reshaping the world of data management. “We’ll see data engineering become more like modern software development than traditional data management,” said Elisabeth Hendrickson, VP of data R&D at Pivotal. “Data engineers and application developers will increasingly collaborate, to the point where no application development team will be complete without at least one data engineer or data scientist. Data pipelines and associated infrastructure will need to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the applications. Borrowing heavily from DevOps, these pipelines will be treated as cattle rather than pets.”
Increasing emphasis on customer and user experience
Customer and user experience is front and center for many data enterprises, and data will be employed to deliver these capabilities. “To date, network operations, IT admin, and app owners or managers have all been siloed into separate teams, executing separate functions while trying to ensure they can provide the best user experience without any line of sight or intelligence into the respective areas playing into that experience,” said Ayman Sayed, chief product officer at CA Technologies. “To mitigate this issue, enterprises will begin adopting digital experience monitoring capable of correlating data across networks, applications, and infrastructures/systems to guarantee the desired user experience on any digital platform. The more data enterprises can pool and correlate, the more insights they can extract that feature the appropriate context and intelligence.”
Industry experts expect 2018 to see expansion of many of the key trends of 2017, including IoT, AI and machine learning, real-time and self-service analytics, and automation. The year ahead promises to be a time of increasing growth and opportunity, as data professionals see their job roles, as well as their organizations, transform to meet the demands of new economic realities.