Data & Analytics (D&A) leaders should embrace three imperatives when leveraging the top D&A trends for 2022 in their enterprise, according to Gartner, Inc. The three key areas are: Activate Dynamism and Diversity, Augment People and Decisions, and Institutionalize Trust.
“This year’s top D&A trends represent business, market and technology dynamics that will help organizations anticipate change and transform uncertainty into opportunity, both of which have come under the purview of the D&A leader,” said Rita Sallam, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner identified 12 top D&A trends for 2022, spanning the three core categories:
The rise of adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as AI engineering, drives growth and innovation while coping with market fluctuations. Data management innovations for AI, automated, active metadata-driven approaches, and data-sharing competencies, all built on data fabrics, liberate the full value of data and analytics.
The trend “always share data,” for example, reinforces data sharing as a business-facing key performance indicator that an organization is achieving effective stakeholder engagement and increasing access to the right data to generate public value. The coronavirus pandemic and other recent large-scale global events have heightened the urgency of data sharing in order to accelerate independent and interconnected public and commercial digital business value.
According to Gartner, by 2026, the use of automated trust metrics across internal and external data ecosystems will replace the majority of outside intermediaries, reducing data sharing risk by half.
Adaptive AI systems, data-centric AI, metadata-driven data fabric, and always share data are among the 2022 trends in this category.
To make insights relevant to decision makers, D&A leaders must deliver enriched, context-driven analytics built from the business’s modular components. This includes prioritizing data literacy and implementing strategies to address the data and analytics talent shortage.
Through 2025, the majority of CDOs will have failed to instill in their workforce the necessary data literacy to achieve their stated strategic data-driven business goals. According to Gartner research, organizations that address the human aspects of D&A outperform those that only consider technology. Rather than simply delivering core platforms, datasets, and tools, a human focus encourages broader digital learning.
Context-enriched analysis, business-composed D&A, decision-centric D&A, and skills and literacy shortfall are among the 2022 trends in this category.
Only by managing AI risks and enacting connected governance across distributed systems, edge environments, and emerging ecosystems can value from D&A be realized at scale.
While AI is becoming more prevalent, most organizations are unable to interpret or explain what their models are doing, leading to a lack of trust and transparency. Organizations are unprepared to manage the risks of rapid AI innovation and are prone to cutting corners in model governance, including security, escalating the negative consequences of underperforming AI models, such as incorrect business decisions or, in the worst-case scenario, those affecting life and death.
As AI regulations spread around the world, they require certain auditable practices to ensure trust, transparency, and consumer protection. Gartner predicts that by 2026, organizations that develop trustworthy purpose-driven AI will see more than 75% of AI innovations succeed, compared to 40% for those that do not.
Connected governance, AI risk management, vendor and region ecosystems, and edge expansion are among the 2022 trends in this category.
