EMPOWERED BUSINESS USERS
The business end user will increasingly move front and center into the enterprise technology realm over the coming year. This will especially be driven by the low-code and no-code movement, said Steven Devoe, data specialty director at SPR. “Previously, teams with advanced technical capabilities were the only ones who could utilize the most advanced analytics. In the no-code and low-code world, the teams that have the best data management and business acumen will be able to deliver much more quickly and reliably than those teams that have historically relied solely on technical aptitude.”
As a result, “employees are becoming technologists who aren’t only relying on IT as the beginning and the end of all digital initiatives,” agreed Steve Watt, senior vice president and chief information officer at Hyland. “Historically, IT has been responsible for the selection, implementation, and ongoing support of all technology platforms. Now, we are moving toward guiding businesses in their technology use so they are empowered to drive their own processes without IT being the bottleneck to the speed at which they need to do business. This goes for data processes as well, and includes helping the employees that are in the business.”
With such empowerment comes the need for more education on data management. “We want end users to not just improve the consumption of data, but evolve to understand how to model and interpret that data in more meaningful ways,” Watt said. “We are investing heavily in the tools we use to integrate and create linkages between our data warehouses and data lakes and the applications themselves, so that our users can build out views and datasets they need with minimal intervention from our more technical staff.”
End-user customers will also be increasingly empowered, added Sibito Morley, senior vice president and chief data officer with Lumen Technologies. “At the core of data enablement is self-service, an essential guiding principle of data productization itself,” he said. “More and more customers want data on demand. They want to use AI to identify latent patterns and recommend solutions, and they want to use it to drive automated decisions. Digital experiences must eventually be powered by real-time data because more and more decisions have to be made in real-time. is not only allows customers to drive innovation and improve speed-to-market, it empowers them to create differentiated digital experiences that are attuned to the context they are in. The right data for the right purpose, used by the right person at the right time.”
A HYBRID WORLD
Ultimately, across all realms, there won’t be single solutions or approaches, but rather, an ongoing hybridization of the business technology space. “Looking forward, we’ll continue to see more companies adopting cloud services and Kubernetes as deployment models, moving away from exploration to implementation,” said Dave Russell, vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. “We’ll see more companies and IT teams fine tuning software and applications to work together seamlessly.”
These changes extend to the end user community as well. “The workforce has been, and still is, experiencing a technical shift, and over the past year, organizations have become more hybrid by nature,” said Russell. “With that comes a shift, in data management strategies. We live in a society where everyone has phones and tablets, work laptops, cloud services, or on-prem services, so it’s safe to assume we’re in the long haul for a very hybrid experience—across locations, devices, deployment models—housing both traditional and next-gen applications.”
Over the past year, Russell continued, “we’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t, in data-management, and it’s important to address what needs to change and improve strategies. If organizations are worried about managing an increasingly dispersed environment and securing it, automation and designing systems that can support a hybrid model that offer data portability and fluidity is the opportunity. Take the challenge and turn it around. Sometimes the solution is not changing everything all at once, but focusing on small areas. Choose solutions you can incrementally bring in as time and resources allow, so that when you get an infusion of resources, you have something that can handle scaling.”