10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2020

Data and analytics are permeating all parts of the digital enterprise. Here are the trends you need to watch in the years ahead.

Data and analytics have gained traction in organizations, driven by the promise of big data a few years ago and the potential of machine learning and other types of artificial intelligence more recently. Even as many enterprises seemed to be stalled in their production AI plans, they are still making those plans, and know they are crucial for success in the years to come.

That’s because data and analytics are serving an expanded role in digital business, according to Gartner analyst and VP Rita Sallam. Data and analytics have become key parts of how you serve customers, hire people, optimize supply chains, optimize finance, and perform so many other key functions in the organization.

With that in mind, there are a number of trends and technologies laying the foundation for successful deployment in the years to come, designed to make you faster and more stable with your efforts.

“You are facing a faster pace of business change, a faster pace of technology change than ever before,” said Sallam. “You need an agile data and analytics architecture that can support that constant change.”

With an eye to that future, Sallam provided a look at “10 Data and Analytics Trends that will Change Your Business” during a session at the recent Gartner IT Symposium, in Orlando, Florida. These trends fit into three major themes. The first one is intelligence. It means that machine learning and AI techniques are being infused into workloads and activities, augmenting user roles, reducing the skills required and automating tasks to improve time-to-insight. The second one is about new data formats. AI and machine learning are supporting more agile and emergent data formats than they have in the past. Finally, there’s scale.

All these trends are 3 to 5 years away, she said, so you won’t see self-service on this list because that’s everywhere now, and you won’t see quantum computing here either because that’s too far away. Cloud is also not on this list because it permeates everything. With those rules in mind, watch for the following 10 trends to change your business in the years to come:

1. Augmented analytics

Across analytics, business intelligence, data science, and machine learning, organizations will leverage augmented analytics to enable more people to gain insights from data. Sallam said that augmented analytics will become the dominant thing that organizations look at when they are assessing vendor selections over the next few years. Also, vendors of other technologies like Salesforce and Workday are incorporating augmented analytics into their products and services to improve the experience for users.

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