{"id":20947,"date":"2022-05-27T16:05:13","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T14:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=20947"},"modified":"2022-06-14T22:48:18","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T20:48:18","slug":"what-i-learned-at-gartner-data-analytics-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/what-i-learned-at-gartner-data-analytics-2022.html","title":{"rendered":"What I Learned At Gartner Data &#038; Analytics 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">I was at the Gartner Data &amp; Analytics conference in London a couple of weeks ago and I\u2019d like to share some thoughts on what I think was interesting, and what I think I learned\u2026<\/p>\n<div class=\"reader-embed-block\">\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mLjFJYCuE8I?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">First, data is by default, and by definition, a\u00a0<strong>liability<\/strong>, because it costs money and has risks associated with it. To turn data into an\u00a0<strong>asset<\/strong>, you actually have to do something with it and drive the business.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">And the best way to do that is to embed data, analytics, and decisions into business workflows. That can be as simply as just making sure that you provide the information people need for a decision just before they make it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">But Gartner is calling for something more sophisticated \u2014 for example, what they call\u00a0<strong>Decision Intelligence<\/strong>, where you go beyond just providing information, and actually help reengineer and optimize decision processes. They say you need data artists that create great questions to complement the data scientists that find great answers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">And then there are\u00a0<strong>Composable Applications<\/strong>, made up of flexible, reusable modules that help people through a series of steps towards a business outcome, including data, decisions, and actions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">And much more of all this is going to be done by the business people themselves, using the latest low code \/ no code technologies \u2014\u00a0<strong>Business Technologists<\/strong>\u00a0as Gartner calls them, or Citizen Composers. This holds out the promise of unleashing more business innovation \u2014 letting business people do more of it themselves, in their area of expertise, without IT and technology being a bottleneck.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">But, of course, it could also mean chaos, so data literacy is important \u2014 making sure that there\u2019s a culture of data, and working to ensure that people are asking better questions, not just getting better answers. And it all needs\u00a0<strong>Governance<\/strong>, which\u2014done right\u2014isn\u2019t about control, but about enablement, the processes around how things should get done.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">And there\u2019s been a big change in technology that is supporting all this. For the longest time, in order to do any analytics,\u00a0<strong>we had to take the data to the technology<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 rip it out of the business applications and move it to a data warehouse or a data lake, or a data lakehouse. The problem is that it\u2019s like ripping a tree out of the forest and trying to get it to grow elsewhere. It\u2019s possible, but it\u2019s a lot of hard work. You lose all the business context, and have to recreate it from scratch, and that can make up 80% of the effort.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">But now, thanks to the cloud and in-memory,\u00a0<strong>we can bring the technology to the data<\/strong>. With a decentralized data fabric or data mesh approach, we leave the data as much as possible where it is, and bring it together as and when needed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">This means we don\u2019t lose all the context, and it becomes much easier to include it into business workflows. And it\u2019s not just about analytics \u2014 I\u2019m seeing data teams embracing technologies like process automation and workflow and chatbots and basic application development, in order to create end-to-end business workflows.\u00a0And all those functionalities are now available as services in the cloud, so everything is just a click away.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">Overall, data and analytics is coming back to where it always should have been, and that\u2019s at the heart of business processes.\u00a0 And that\u2019s great news for companies like SAP, because we\u2019ve been doing intelligent business processes for a long, long time, and we have steadily increased the intelligence and the flexibility as technology has progressed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">In fact, the examples that Gartner gave of more business-centric decision intelligence and composable applications, such as more intelligent product returns, are being done by customers right now using\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sap.com\/btp\">SAP Business Technology Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">And you don\u2019t have to take my word for it \u2014 many of them are featured on the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sap.com\/btp\">sap.com\/btp<\/a>\u00a0site, or in the latest crop of SAP Innovation Awards, and you can see all the details of those projects, including the business problems, the benefits, the architecture choices, and the technologies used, at sap.com\/innovationawards.<\/p>\n<p class=\"reader-text-block__paragraph\">In conclusion: analytics means business! Come talk to us about how to run your business better!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A quick summary of what I think I learned at the recent Gartner Data &#038; Analytics conference in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bi-20","category-conferences"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/timo-elliott-presenting-at-gartner-data-and-analytics-2022b.jpg?fit=827%2C465&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-5rR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20947"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20959,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20947\/revisions\/20959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}