2023 Reflections from Our Data Team

As we draw the curtain on 2023 and look ahead to the opportunities and challenges that 2024 will bring, our data management team looks at the lessons learned this past year – the power of data, and how it is transforming our industry. Here our team shares some of their key reflections from the past 12 months…

Warren Truss – Director

“Reflecting on the transformation towards the democratisation of data, the essence lies in making all data domains self-service, liberating teams from constant realignment due to dependencies on others. While challenging, the success observed across our client base attests to the compelling value proposition. The key drivers for a data mesh initiative, acknowledging their complexity, encompass automated pipelines, self-service infrastructure, cross-functional domain teams, active business participation, and crucial board-level sponsorship. This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also serves as a robust foundation for establishing an effective data fabric.”

Carl Lockwood – Senior Consultant

“In a data migration, readiness and adoption can be enhanced through early engagement and collaboration, embedding of business resources throughout the project. Trying to stretch key resources so they contribute to the project and still do their day job is likely to be a false economy which will hinder the project efficiency.

Sean Donahoe – Senior Consultant

“Data observability is essentially, an organisation’s comprehensive understanding of the performance and health of data within their systems. The power of this tooling transcends silo’d projects and departments, where monitoring is automated, optimal performance improvements are generated, root cause analysis can be easily identified and troubleshooted, and any breaks in data pipeline (integration, mastering, extraction) can be fixed. This will enable cost and time savings, and enhances data governance and quality control. As I’ve seen at a few clients, these responsibilities are always performed by different teams, with different priorities, budgets, constraints, technologies, etc. For me, a key theme (maybe for 2024 rather than 2023), is the adoption and usage of a multi-purpose tool within cloud-computing space.”

Judith Kirkwood-Law – Programme Lead

“This year notable for me was how many vendors we have seen increasingly leveraging AI and NLP technologies to advance their offerings. For example anomaly detection and automated data extraction, dashboard and report/MI generation, chatbots and virtual assistants. Feels like this is going to start to become a differentiator in the near future.”

Arun Muttu – Senior Consultant

“This is a loaded topic that is hard to summarise without glossing over the myriad details. It is essentially the democratisation of data, such that all data domains become self-service, and teams no longer realign their initiatives based on their dependency on resources from other teams. It isn’t easy, but as we have seen with some clients, it has a convincing value proposition. To name the themes that are needed to drive a data mesh initiative (again, I recognise these are loaded topics): automated pipelines, self-service infrastructure, cross-functional domain teams, business participation, and board-level sponsorship. It is also the strongest foundation for implementing a data fabric.

Ajit Singh – Senior Consultant

“This year notable for me is ‘Best-of-Breed solutions vs general All-In-One solution’. The data space is expanding exponentially and so the need to process not just the huge data volumes but with the speed of data processing, deriving value from data either via using BI / ML / AI. The traditional all-in-one solutions are not able to cope up with recent data challenges. In a quest to derive real-time value but at a limiting cost, the clients are getting more inclined to use and integrate best-in-breed solutions in their data pipeline.”

Data is your most powerful asset, and our team of industry leading experts can help you maximise efficiency and minimising redundancy for 2024 and beyond. To find out how, please get in touch.