Twenty years ago as Y2K loomed, there was widespread anxiety and fear that bad data could cause infrastructures to crumble and economies to collapse. Fast forward to the eve of 2020, and more data crosses the internet every second than was stored on the entire internet in 1999.

Despite this transformative change, data quality remains a persistent concern in an increasingly data dependent world, as Infogix’s data management predictions for 2020 reveal.

These top data predictions for 2020 were assembled by business leaders at Infogix who have decades of experience in information technology. The major predictions include:

2020 Vision: Top Data Management Predictions from Infogix

Real-Time Data to Disrupt the Future

• Massive amounts of data are generated from a diverse set of industry domains, including social networks, e-commerce, transactions, IoT devices and web applications, requiring organizations to react quickly to extract value from that data.

• Traditional batch processing, where data is sent on a schedule from system to system, will not meet the demands of the changing data landscape.

• Companies are increasingly turning to event-driven architectures to handle growing volumes of streaming data, using distributed streaming platforms like Apache Kafka, ActiveMQ, Apache Pulsar, Amazon Kinesis and many others to provide high-throughput, low latency real-time streaming, flexible data retention, redundancy and scalability.

• In a world that demands lightning-fast speed-to-insights and real-time access to data, data quality has never been so important. Organizations must enlist vendors who can safeguard data quality to prevent data assets from becoming liabilities and provide validation at a speed and scale to match their data-in-motion.

Cultural Change through Data Governance• More and more organizations are embracing data governance as a means to improve

enterprise data understanding and create a data-driven culture, yet many still struggle to bridge the technical/business divide.

• Business-focused data governance encourages collaboration between business and technical stakeholders to build user-friendly tools, like data catalogs, that explain technical data in a business context and include critical institutional business knowledge. A business-oriented approach prioritizes business user understanding, empowering them to quickly turn data assets into actionable business insights.

• Business users won’t use or depend on data they don’t trust, making data quality a critical element of any data governance effort. Data governance that includes end-to-end data quality monitoring and metrics gives both technical and non-technical users a 360-degree view of data that will lead to increased revenue, customer retention and competitive advantage.

Conquering Bad Data

• Even though data quality is one of the most persistent and pervasive challenges in data management, historically organizations only prioritized quality when revenue, reputation or mission-critical data was at risk. But that is changing.

• Complex regulatory compliance and the ever-increasing speed and scale of data have prompted organizations to prioritize data quality as a critical component of their enterprise data governance initiatives.

• By building a data quality-powered data governance framework, organizations improve enterprise data value and resolve data quality issues before they proliferate across systems. They can’t afford to experience a data quality crisis that impacts their revenue and reputation.

Maturing Data Privacy Laws• The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented nearly two years ago,

serving as a global catalyst for data privacy legislation. In the U.S., states like Nevada and California have already passed sweeping legislation to protect the personal data of consumers, with many other states poised to follow suit.

• Noncompliant companies risk both significant financial fines and reputational damage, prompting many organizations to evaluate and address any potential compliance gaps.

• Businesses need strong data governance to identify and protect personal data, control data access and track lineage as data moves from sources to systems and processes, but data quality also plays a critical role in mitigating compliance risk. Poorly maintained data and poor quality data can both easily result in compliance violations that impact an organization’s brand and bottom line.

Self-Service Technologies on the Rise

The 2020 Buzzword: Automation

• Tools and technologies with machine learning (ML) and automation capabilities that enable self-service data analytics took off in 2019. Still, we often see these tools leveraged as part of a departmental project, rather than an enterprise program.

• To scale enterprise-wide, organizations must encourage data literacy among users so self-service analysis yields accurate and actionable results.

• Organizations must also establish policies for data access and usage, and ensure the accuracy of high-value data with key capabilities including timeliness, completeness and integrity checks. Only quality data will yield quality business insights.

• In the coming year, expect everyone to be talking automation! From hyper-automation using machine learning and AI, to workforce automation that eliminates jobs, to IoT building automation for physical plant efficiency—automation will be a top focus in data and technology.

• In analytics, companies will have to take self-service to the next level, not just empowering business users to analyze data, but completely automating data science tasks so they can focus more on leveraging insights than generating them.

• With automated data and analytics, data integrity will be even more critical, demanding automated data quality detection, monitoring and improvement.

About Infogix, Inc.In our fourth decade as an industry pioneer, Infogix continues to provide large and mid-market companies around the globe with a broad range of integrated and configurable tools to govern, manage and use data. From operations and the office of data to sales, and from product and customer service to marketing—users across the entire organization rely on our software to remove barriers to data access, accelerate time to insight, increase operational efficiency and confidently trust business decisions. Our best in class retention rate is proof of our customer-centric focus as we partner with them to thrive in today’s data-driven economy. To learn more visit www.infogix.com or @Infogix.

Develop, implement and optimize your data management and governance strategy with Infogix. Visit www.infogix.com or call +1.630.505.1800 (US, Canada, and International), +44 1242 674 137 (UK and Europe).