Weekly Dose of Data Clarity - 08

Building Data Foundations

What’s Hot 🔥

Data and AI Growth Survey Report 🧱

Buzzword - data fabric ☂️

Google Canada AI chatbot - finally ♊

Share the Chair 🪑

Thursday, February 8th, 2024

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What’s Hot? 🔥

Deloitte Teams With Informatica and Workiva to Enhance Data Management and Simplify Enterprise Sustainability Compliance

The new data management offering combines Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, Workiva’s cloud-based regulatory reporting system, and Deloitte’s technology and domain experience. The platform aims to respond to cited concerns from business leaders, many of whom express difficulty in measuring their organization’s environmental impact. 

(Source: environmentenergyleader.com)

Amazon’s Cloud Boss Likens Generative AI Hype to the Dotcom Bubble 

Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon’s dominant cloud platform AWS, says generative AI is valuable but that the excitement around some AI companies is similar to when dotcom darlings were “dramatically overhyped.” (Source: wired.com)

Circana Launches Liquid Data Engage, Propelling Retailers Into a New Era of Decision-Making

With Liquid Data Engage, Circana addresses the unique challenges faced by retailers, simplifying the complexity of managing market performance, category management, loyalty, supply chain, and retail media data assets in one simple-to-use solution. (Source: globenewswire.com)

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Laying the foundation for data- and AI-led growth 🧱

Laying the foundation for data- and AI-led growth” is an MIT Technology Review Insights report by Databricks. Results are from a global survey and in-depth interviews of senior data and technology executives of large private and public sector organizations Here are the results (Source: databricks.com)

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Beyond the Buzzwords ☂️

According to Gartner, a data fabric is an emerging data management design for attaining flexible, reusable and augmented data integration pipelines, services and semantics.

data fabric

A US patent related to the data fabric is titled, Hybrid cloud integration fabric and ontology for integration of data, applications, and information technology infrastructure. Follow here for the patent. (Source: upsto.gov) 

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Bard who? Google bringing AI chatbot, now called Gemini, to Canada ♊

Google positioned the announcement as a product of the company getting more clarity around Canada's Bill C-18. That bill, known as the Online News Act, requires Google and Meta to enter into agreements that compensate Canadian media companies when their content is posted on or repurposed by the platforms.(Source: thestar.com)

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Do you know about the Parks Canada Red Chairs? 🪑

Get out there and #sharethechair!

In 2011, team members at Gros Morne National Park came up with the idea to place 18 sets of Adirondack chairs in lesser-known, but just as stunning locations, inviting visitors to enjoy and share on social media. Today, the iconic red chairs can be found in over 100 locations administered by Parks Canada. (Source: parks.canada.ca)

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Weekly Dose of Data Clarity - 07

Collaborate for Data Innovation

What’s Hot ♨️

Smart Cities - CES 2024 Innovation Award Mentions 🏢

Beyond the Buzzwords 🪟

Data Analytics Predictions for 2024  🍁

Arsenal FC Fans get data offerings ⚽️

National Balanced Life Month ⚖️

Thursday, January 11th, 2024

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What’s Hot ? ♨️

IBM Collaborates with SAP To Develop New AI Solutions for the Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail Industries

IBM announced its collaboration with SAP to develop solutions to help clients in the consumer packaged goods and retail industries enhance their supply chain, finance operations, sales and services using generative AI. (Source: ibm.com)

Microsoft Upgrades Cloud Services to Enhance EU Data Sovereignty

Global technology companies have been under increasing pressure from regulators within the EU to provide so-called sovereign cloud services, which ensure that personal data is not only stored locally, as required by the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, but also processed locally.

Microsoft said that its EU Data Boundary offering goes “beyond European compliance requirements.” It follows similar sovereign cloud announcements from AWS and Oracle Corp.(Source: bnnbloomberg.ca.com)

InfluxData Achieves AWS Data and Analytics Competency Status

InfluxData, creator of the leading time series database InfluxDB, today announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data and Analytics Competency status in the Data Analytics Platforms and NoSQL/New SQL categories. (Source: businesswire.com)

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CES 2024 Innovation Award Mentions 🏢

Smart Cities

• Clear Solar Glass - inQs Co. 

• Touch Free Holo Button - vTouch inc.

• Smart Crowd Analytics - Vueron Technology Co.

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Beyond the Buzzwords 🪟

single-pane-of-glass

Like a vast window that lets you see as much of the view outside as possible, a single pane of glass in IT gives you a bird’s eye view of possibly all the data you can get from your systems and applications in one go. (More here: Techslang.com)

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10 Data Analytics Predictions for 2024  🍁

Ten predictions weren't enough for IT World Canada, so they've got 10 more. 

1. Data storytelling

2. Advanced data visualization

3. Stream processing

4. Augmented analytics

5. Data orchestration

6. Object stores

7. SQL vs. NoSQL

8. Data fabric

9. Vector databases

10. Single-pane-of-glass 

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Arsenal FC Fans get data offerings ⚽️

Arsenal F.C. is partnering with InCrowd to enhance its digital offerings to Gunners’ supporters. 

The Premier League club, will have access to InCrowd’s Fan Data Platform, which sets up an ecosystem for teams to better target fans with activations, content and offerings. InCrowd produces many data-capturing opportunities through polling, predictive games and forms. (Source: sportsbusinessjournal.com)

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National Balanced Life Month ⚖️

Take care of yourself so you can be your best self for the people in your life. Here's a life balance tip from the Canadian Mental Health Association

Learn to manage stress effectively 

Take a five-minute vacation – Each day, set aside five minutes for a mental health break. Close your office door or go into another room, and day-dream about a place, person or idea, or think about nothing at all! You will feel like you have been on a mini-vacation. 

Let us know what you think! We want some feedback to make this weekly better for you.

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Outlook on 2024 - CIOs Doing More with Less

From what we’re hearing in the Data Analytics industry, we expect to see companies hold or reduce their technology spend in 2024. Although in contrast to what some industry analysts are saying, we see companies are tightening things up and optimising for profitability (with a greater impact on traditional businesses than digital ones). 

Companies with property assets like REITS or CRE who are in position to refinance or renegotiate loans will be doing so at a higher rate than they did five years ago. So essentially, companies that have debt as part of their business model are going to feel this more than others. 

They will aim to hold growth steady or instead, re-tool for profitability. So in doing that, any kind of technology initiative that's geared towards growth is not going to be as attractive. They will look at technology that's helping them shed costs. 

Because of this, we expect three things to happen this year:

• Big push to reduce technology spending 

• Slow down on our GenAI and AI initiatives

• Strengthening of internal teams 

Reduce Technology Spending

Leaders looking to directly reduce spending (vs creating value or cost deflection) are going to have a greater chance of success this year. Commonly, those decisions are made by taking the following actions: 

• Better manage cloud usage and/or bring on-premises data into the cloud

• Consolidate vendors to streamline redundant data sources 

• Reassess service contracts, so you pay only for things you use

For example

• If you are using a property management software system that has 600 licences and you have a similar system  generating the operational information you need, then you can retire those licences. 

• It’s time to get serious about legacy systems to save money. Move on-premises data servers or a combination of on-prem and data centre hardware to the cloud.

• Reassess service contracts to eliminate redundant add-ons if it's feasible. Alternatively, maintenance contracts might include items that are typically incurring office expenses like printer toner. 

Take a look at our blog on Modernising Data Analytics for REITs for examples by business unit.

Continued Innovation

This one is potentially polarising, but I feel like, in the enterprise space, we’re in for a bit of an AI winter. Although vendors will continue to push along their AI agenda, we think the funding and experimentation from 2023 has not yielded demonstrable value at scale. We see CIOs monitoring this space, but cautious to make any significant investments in GenAI for 2024 unless there are real, industry specific, reference-able success stories that clearly show positive ROI.

On Pressure to report gains in AI

“True innovation lies in the ROI phase rather than the hype phase

Jim Young, Realcomm Founder

Realcomm Innovation Outlook and Reflection Webinar, Part I

There are prototypes and presentations out there but nothing of Enterprise Value. The economics and some of the projects aren't as attractive in production. We’ve heard a lot of chatter that it’s really easy to build solutions on OpenAI's APIs. However, when you start to look at how they monetize on API calls and you do that calculation, the total cost of ownership starts to become very expensive.

There's just not a lot of maturity there. If you combine that with tight budgets within the CIO office, people will still be following it and vendors will continue to add generative AI capabilities to their products. But, we think CIOs are going to be risk averse and will require some very real referenceable results. 

Here are some points to think about:

• GenAI is not the only thing on the table

• Save time and improve efficiency with simpler tools or traditional ML

• Communicate a strong use case, with the long game in mind

Strengthening Internal Teams

We’re going to start seeing a change in how consultants are used. Teams are getting squeezed and the work still has to get done while finding ways to do it cheaper. We expect to see companies pulling back on their consulting spend and re-investing that to build out their own internal teams.

Here are some areas that are best to work on:

1. Focus on the interconnectedness of operational data

2. Establish business unit partners to share in house expertise

3. Bring in co-creation partners to build upon internal team experience

We think the days of the large consulting engagements are numbered, especially in areas that are of strategic value to organisations like cyber, data and AI.

The 2024 Data Analytics Strategy

The best way to tackle 2024 is with a sound data and analytics strategy that strengthens fundamentals with the input of people who use the data in their day-to-day. 

We can help you start the year off right:

Solve the Problem First - the Right Problem - Reduced or frozen budgets create constraints. A laser focus on solving the right problem will get you through the challenges. 

Business Alignment - A shift in mindset where business units and IT goals are in alignment will give people the insights they need to make better, cost saving, decisions. 

Data Modernization - Under the pressure to report gains in AI, a single source of truth with clean, synced data sources is needed to save on R&D. 

Can’t see through the weeds?

We can help with your 2024 data analytics strategy

Reach out today!