Following on from our first post about awards & trends for research professionals, this week we turn our attention to data teams. Foundational to holistic customer insight, in the past they have too often been neglected as a cinderella services within the insight department. However, that is changing. The cache of “big data” and momentum for organisations to understand the data they have or even better monetise that asset has meant much more media attention for data geeks.
To start with awards, I’ve noticed a few being publicised during 2014 or planned for 2015, but one organisation has consistently delivered these for years and pioneered more focus on data issues. They are DataIQ, who together with their well worth reading magazine, provide advice services and awards throughout the year. Their latest creation, as they seek to innovate in this category, is The Big Data 100. More than just an award ceremony, it’s a means of recognising the movers and shakers in the data industry. With a launch event on 25 Feb it will be interested to see who is recognised as shaping this industry, beyond all the ‘smoke & mirrors’ that surround big data conferences. Sadly not me 😉
A number of pundits have mentioned the expected rise in Chief Data Officer appointments in 2015. For that reason, even though not communicated as a trend, I think this short case by Larissa Moss, for why every enterprise needs a CDO, is a timely reminder:
When thinking about forecasting the way technology will develop over the coming year, you can always do a lot worse than check what Gartner are saying. So, it is interesting to see that their latest forecast of technology trends for 2015 including many items which will create even more diverse & sizeable big data to be managed by organisations (as well as the information security challenges of doing more ‘in the cloud’:
When reading around for trends and advice on data management it is often difficult to pick this apart from a focus on either analytics or BI. All to often the focus is predominantly on some new sexy analytics tool or presentation layers. So, I was glad to see that in their summary of 5 key trends in analytics, BI & Data Management – Information Week gave plenty of emphasis to the key data management developments. This is well worth reading:
I predict that the twin challenges, of whether to find lower cost ways to join up their data systems internally (Hadoop, NoSQL etc) or migrate key data items into cloud based data warehousing to work with cloud based analytics, will keep CDOs awake at night during 2015. They will certainly come under pressure from CEOs and others who receive very compelling pitches from vendors who won’t need to live with the information security concerns.
What about you? Do any data trends for 2015 interest you? Are you in the running for any awards? Do tell…
