The following are a set of predictions for the coming decade from respected data analytics expert/veteran CEO/VC partner, Dr. Buno Pati of Infoworks.
The Ability to Harness the Power of Data will Accelerate Disruption Across the Economy and Create Winners and Losers More Quickly than in the Past.
New challengers will rise faster than seen before in this next decade and incumbent leaders will fall just as fast. Research from BCG shows that for large companies, there is now less correlation between past and future financial and competitive performance over multiple years.
Data scientists across all industries currently spend about 80% of their time on lower-value activity such as ingesting data, incrementally updating data, organizing and managing data, optimizing pipelines, and delivering data to applications. The cost is that only 20% of data scientists’ time is spent on developing applications to further growth and competitive advantage for business. Those who truly harness the power of data via new, automated approaches to data operations and orchestration will thrive, since this will enable them to focus their data science talent on creating business value. The impact of digital transformation will be felt across all segments of the economy – in expected (technology, financial services, retail/etail, etc.) and unexpected places (agriculture, home improvement, public sector, etc.).
We Will See a Dramatic Increase in Consumer Control Over “Personal” Data as Privacy Laws Evolve Over the Next Decade.
GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) are just the tip of the iceberg with regards to the protection and consumer control of consumer data. Over the course of the next decade, consumer control of personal data can be expected to increase dramatically as governments and regulators drive new privacy legislation. In time, these regulatory actions will likely lead to complete consumer control of personal data and opportunities for consumers to directly monetize their data or directly exchange data for goods and services.
The Clean-Power Movement Will Create a Deluge of Data and New Analytics Use Cases Over the Next Decade.
The fastest growing industries in America today are solar and wind, and jobs in these industries are expected to grow twice as fast as any other occupation over the next decade (source: U.S. Representative from California’s 17th congressional district, Ro Khanna). Technological advancements in these industries have driven costs down and sparked a clean-power movement that quadrupled global renewable energy capacity within the past nine years (source: UNEP). This capacity, which is more than every power plant in the U.S. combined, will create a deluge of data and new analytics use cases aimed at maximizing the benefits and optimizing the use of these technological developments over the next decade. Managing and utilizing this tsunami of data will require sophisticated systems for data operations and orchestration, which transcend the manually-intensive methodologies of the past and enable data scientists to focus on the best and highest use of their talents – driving continued growth in the industry through data-driven processes and insights.
Brick and Mortars That Don’t Embrace Agile Data-Driven Retailing Will Die a Slow Death in the Next Decade.
In the next decade, we’ll see a tremendous rise in agile data-driven retailing. We’ll see brick and mortar retailers increasingly rely on data to unify the omni-channel retail experience, streamline operations, improve decision making processes, and provide the agility needed to adapt to market dynamics. Retail business models will change at an accelerated rate in this next decade. We’ll see the retail organizations that modernize their data operations maintaining their competitive edge and the ones that don’t will die. Forrester Research recently called slow and inaccessible data the “kiss of death.” Regardless of how much data retail organizations have on hand, they must also have real-time, always-on access to that data.
