Full Stack's
2021 Technology Trends
Trend Insight 5 - Data refining is becoming industrialised
2020 was in many ways as the years before were – continued hype in overdrive around machine learning, AI, IoT and a word salad of acronyms. They continue for the most part to be augmentative at best, and indeed not extracting the deep insights they claim.
Despite every BI tool on earth being thrown at COVID-19 data sets, they proved their futility once and for all as active agents. They visualise and represent the past. Models trained on data are often inaccurate and occasionally wrong.
Weather forecasting became less accurate for the first time in many decades. The cause is that much of global supercomputing orientated towards work on COVID research. This was exacerbated by increasingly chaotic weather patterns,.
The deterministic dream of data being equivalent to knowledge remains precisely that – a dream deferred.
That being said, we believe that many excellent and vital data sets can and should be operationalised within businesses great and small. To do so, we can see companies moving towards a greater understanding and refinement of the data they actually have at hand. Not the mystical data sources they would like to have.
The analogy of big data to big oil is a tried and true one. So much technological air is expended currently on the future of data. Still, the present remains the dirty, messy and often speculative work of refining data within the enterprise. Enterprises remain hamstrung. They have few ways to achieve this needed industrialisation of data. By management consultancies selling panaceas, internal teams with entrenched positions, often paired with revolving-door relationships with database and analysis tool vendors.
2021 will see those businesses investing in data refining continuing to win. They will do this by having humble and realistic ambitions for data. Data can be used to make meaningful, incremental and daily inspection and adaption improvements within their organisations. Those who continue to believe the magic angels of ML and AI will grant them competitive advantage will find themselves with little more than large bills to cloud providers like AWS and Azure.