We like staying ahead of the curve at Ometis and have been compiling our predictions for 2024 data trends to help you navigate this ever-evolving world.
Before we look over the next 12 months though, it’s important to review a transformative 2023 and some of its pivotal trends.
Last year saw discussion shift towards data governance, literacy and culture as businesses realised the importance of a robust data governance framework, improved data literacy amongst staff and nurturing a data-driven culture.
Consolidation of Data Stacks was also a 2023 trend, as the push towards streamlined and efficient data infrastructures continued. Ometis helped organisations across the country achieve a consistent and reliable view of their data landscape, simplifying complexities and enhancing productivity.
Another driver of discussions in 2023 was data security, due to the rise in cyber threats and regulatory requirements tightening, but the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/DI) was the biggest focus last year. This has enabled more agile, accurate and efficient development and deployment of data solutions.
In short, it was a big year for data but what are the 2024 trends? Well, here at Ometis we’ve pulled together our predictions.
GENERATIVE AI, DATA GOVERNANCE & COST EFFICIENCES
Andy Patrick, Managing Director
For me, one 2024 trend to watch is Generative AI. People will always want to find ways to be more efficient and that is where GenAI can help. It also becomes an inspiration for new ideas, thoughts etc.
With Qlik's capabilities to link to Advanced Connectors such as OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock, for instance, it opens up possibilities of passing small or large amounts of data through to GenAI to get insights back.
Data Governance is another 2024 trend because of Generative AI capabilities, companies will want to ensure the data people are using is well governed and controlled. This means there will be a greater need for good data governance, including aggregation, usage and cost analysis.
With the growth of Cloud vendors such as Snowflake and Databricks, more companies are moving data to the cloud for storage and compute. As this beds in further, there will be a need for organisations to look at how much that costs and consider strategies to save money. That can come in many forms, aggregation of data from some uses cases, usage analysis and redundant or old data – it will all come down to how to save costs.
Luckily Qlik provided Analysis Apps over Snowflake, Databricks, AWS and Azure to allow companies to look at that data and make informed decisions on what processes are costing them money, security of that data and recommendations on how to best utilise the cloud vendors of choice offerings.
COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE, EMBEDDED DATA QUALITY AND A REFOCUS ON REAL-TIME
Chris Lofthouse, Commercial Director
Collaborative governance will be a 2024 trend because, today, the velocity at which information is thrown at people is simply overwhelming. It's reached a point where misinformation has become a norm and forced the likes of media outlets and social media platforms to fact-check trending headlines.
This in turn has shined a light on misinformation within organisations and the data they report on. How do those platforms implement fact-checking when faced with more information than human capacity to check it all? Well, it's quite simple, through collaboration with the very users contributing to and consuming the information. Collaborative governance is a natural evolution in DataOps, providing the power to deploy human expertise at scale and ensuring the right people can provide the right feedback via data validation, issue detection, error resolution, fostering accountability and frequent monitoring of data.
Embedded Data Quality is another 2024 business intelligence trend. Coupled with my previous point is the need to embed and automate data quality tasks, from automatically profiling, organising, linking and enriching data and metadata, to leveraging machine learning and GenAI. This will help continually deliver the most current and accurate data and not get bogged-down by onboarding and maintaining large data.
My final 2024 BI trend will be a refocus on real-time. Continuing with the data quality theme of my previous points is the need for timely data. A factor of good data quality is how up-to-date it is. I foresee people's need for real-time or near real-time (sub one-hour reloads) growing. What would be more reassuring for a decision-maker doing the final check on up-to-date data, knowing it confirms their intended action?
Equally, if businesses want to embrace the full potential of data alerting and more systematic data-driven decisions in every-day processes then nightly refreshes of data isn't going to be enough. To drive swift action, users will need and want fresh data. There's a saying I like which summarises this well, "You wouldn't pick your outfit based on yesterday's weather".
DATA ANALYTICS, DATA INTEGRATION & DATA GOVERNANCE
David Tomlins, Head of Solution Architecture
The most changes that we will see in Qlik this year will be the affect the Talend acquisition has on the existing Qlik product set. We will see the things that made Talend a market leader in Data Integration and Governance enhance the Qlik platform’s capabilities.
Data Analytics will be a renewed trend in 2024. It is a well-known secret that the data management tool is not used as much as Qlik had hoped and I expect Qlik to work towards making that better. Qlik script (IMHO) is a powerful USP but it can be a barrier to entry. We can already see what Talend has done in their cloud platform in data preparation and would expect at least some of that thinking to come into the Analytics platform.
Something Qlik hasn’t done a lot of, while Talend and its competitors have, was provide pre-built templates for other products, so this seems an easy win to provide this for their customers.
Data Orchestration is another trend. Qlik Application Automation (QAA) has become a more valuable part of the Qlik platform than anyone could have predicted and we see how it benefits the Analytics platform. I would expect it to become more integrated with the Data Integration platform in the next year, and of the whole of the Qlik platform too. QAA works in the most similar way as the Talend data integration products, so I would expect some of that Talend technology to enhance its capability further for more complex use cases.
Integration is going to be another 2024 trend. Qlik Cloud Data Integration works by replicating the data from source to your target platform and then utilising the platform of choice with push-down SQL to create your pipeline, which is quite different to Talend's main product set, which uses Java runtime environments.
However, what I think you will see in this space will be creation of Data Quality processes added to your data pipeline. That will probably start with capability that allows you to detect DQ issues, currently Talend uses RegEx and data dictionaries. Then we will see some functionality which will allow for those issues to be resolved, either programmatically, by and end user, or, if they are really ambitious, with AI.
My final trend for 2024 is Data Governance. I would expect to see a continued development of the existing catalogue functionality to include Talend Data Inventory scoring capability. Data Governance should work as projects, identifying issues, assessing and planning before delivering and mitigating against the risk. Talend Data Inventory gives end users great visibility and I think this will become a game changer for Qlik, allowing the platform to offer more than any of its other competitors.
LOOKING AHEAD: NAVIGATING 2024 WITH OMETIS
Staying ahead of the curve is crucial and partnering with a leader like Ometis can make all the difference. With our dedicated team of experts and commitment to excellence, Ometis is poised to guide businesses through the complexities of data management and analytics and ensure they harness the full potential of their data.
Whether it's adapting to new security challenges, leveraging the latest in data analytics or driving a culture of informed decision-making, Ometis is ready to help. As the UK's leading Qlik consultancy, we are more than just service providers, we are strategic partners in your journey towards data-driven excellence.
Comments