Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research recently announced its 2020 research agenda for data, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations derive optimal value and improve business outcomes. Data volumes continue to grow while data latency requirements continue to shrink. Meanwhile, virtually every organization is confronting a need for good data governance. 

Organizations need assistance to understand how to deal with these changes. To help, we craft our research agenda using our firm’s expertise on business requirements and our knowledge of technology vendors and products. Through our continuous market research, we offer insights and best practices for both the lines of business and IT as well as insights across industry verticals that will help any organization reach its maximum potential.

Ventana Research offers guidance on data and information management to help expand information competencies. In our research we explore smarter storage, computing, integration, virtualization, governance and preparation to uncover and advocate for new methods for using information effectively. Our Data practice includes six focus areas: blockchain; collaboration; data governance; data lakes; data integration; and information management.

Blockchain

Blockchain distributed ledger technology is a shared database of information assets located on multiple nodes on a network. Emerging distributed ledger technology will expand beyond the Office of Finance, serving as a machine-to-machine universal data connector for B2B transactions. As more organizations deploy blockchain databases over the next few years, they will become a critical data source for analytics. This year we will be conducting new market research to examine this rapidly evolving technology.

Collaboration

Collaboration provides methods for people to interact digitally on any device for any business purpose. Interactive social media has conditioned businesses to expect and embrace collaboration. Collaboration will enhance information sharing in analytics processes as comments and ratings are associated with data sources, analyses and contributors; these technologies will enable more effective use of data throughout the organization. We study organizations’ use of technology to support better collaboration in all of our research and will continue to investigate this topic in 2020.

Data Governance

Data governance ensures that an organization’s data can be cataloged, trusted and protected. Organizations too often have adopted new data types without ensuring that the requisite data governance is in place. Fortunately, data catalogs have made governance “enabling” rather than “disabling” by making it easier to find and understand data. Unfortunately, data catalogs appear to be proliferating and organizations risk having silos of catalog information. Organizations also face an imperative to develop and implement a data governance strategy that includes all types of data. We are launching new benchmark research on this topic in 2020 to investigate organizations’ needs, plans and attitudes on data governance.

Data Lakes

Data lakes combine massive storage capabilities for any type of data in any format with the processing power needed to transform and analyze the data. Many organizations currently are debating the role of data lakes versus data warehouses. Object stores are playing an increasing role as the storage platform for data lakes. Furthermore, the proliferation of unstructured data often means that organizations must deal with multiple storage architectures. We will continue to study data lakes this year in our ongoing Dynamic Insights research.

Data Integration

Data Integration enables organizations to integrate and transform data into usable information to maximize the value of analyses and operational use of the data. Business users increasingly expect to access data sources directly without requiring support from IT. Organizations will need to adopt strategies to integrate streaming data into their information architectures. Effective data integration strategies also need to be more responsive to new information sources and accommodate the variety of data organizations can collect. This year we will continue to study integration in all of our data research.

Information Management

Information management enables organizations to effectively manage increasing volumes of data and assemble information for business use. Cloud and IoT technologies and the proliferation of unstructured data are resulting in more diverse and distributed data sources. Data lakes provide comprehensive data sets to support analytics and machine learning and data virtualization enables access to these diverse data sources and data lakes. Organizations must evaluate the changing architectures and deployment options that can help them better manage these data sets. We study the processes and technology organizations employ to support information management in all our data-related research and will continue to investigate this topic in 2020.

Today there is more data than ever and it’s available at an increasingly fast pace. Taking advantage of this data is critical to success but organizations need guidance on how best to manage and distribute this valuable resource.

We encourage you to participate in our research studies. Also, join our community to keep up to date on our research efforts in 2020 and check out our data expertise and topic areas to see a detailed agenda and continuously updated 90-day calendar as well as research facts and best practices.

Regards,
David Menninger