New research shows that data will, unsurprisingly, take priority in nearly all enterprises in 2023. This trend is evidence from a survey conducted by data mastering firm Tamr, who partnered with Propeller Insights to research the top data challenges impacting business productivity and competitiveness in the market.
The survey data was drawn from interviews with 500 data leaders about their enterprise data initiatives for 2023.
It was found that 93 percent of company executives have new data initiatives and projects planned for 2023, with 75 percent focusing on improving data quality and 65 percent investing in data management technologies.
The four primary areas of focus for companies seeking a competitive edge in an increasingly unpredictable business environment are: data culture, data integration, data governance, and data architecture. To obtain better value from associated projects, many firms plan to better integrate data scientists into the rest of the business is a top priority for 2023.
In terms of what these represent:
- Data culture: Compared to traditional non-digital native companies, data-driven companies think differently about roles and organizational structures.
- Data integration: When an organization attempts to integrate data from multiple, siloed source systems, continuously cleaning and organizing the data for use by a broad population of consumers in an enterprise is a significant challenge.
- Data governance: The focus is shifting away from source-based governance (which mainly focuses on data cataloguing and governance workflows) toward consumption-based data governance (which focuses on appropriate use and control of access to data downstream).
- Data privacy: Between new regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), data privacy and security have evolved.
- Data Infrastructure: Companies have more data – and more data sources – than ever before. Data silos proliferate and data sources are idiosyncratic, making the task of integrating and aligning data across an organization extremely difficult.
Underpinning these data-driven imperatives is the acceleration of digital transformation projects. Yet this requires companies to have better command over their core data and avoiding pitfalls like data being incorrect, incomplete, out-of-date, duplicative or siloed. Each of these makes sored data both unreliable and difficult to use.
Adaptation will also be important and many organizations will need to change to address the growing volume, velocity and variety of data. This accounts for why investments in data and data-related initiatives are rising.
There are other drivers as well, including the necessity of managing data at scale and revised data technology to support the new regulations, strategies and priorities of modern organizations focused on digital transformation.
