Digitalization has allowed data to be the foundation in accelerating business growth and driving strategic and financial decisions across all industries. As this pandemic continues to cause unprecedented changes in market dynamics, data will continue to be at the heart of effective leadership. To be more specific, data that we can trust.
We list down five trends in data analytics we can expect throughout 2021 and beyond
Trend 1: Data and analytics as a core business function
A solid data strategy is crucial for a business to incorporate trending technologies to improve operational efficiencies – from data security to data governance or even choosing the right data technologies. Instead of being just a supporting role, data analytics expertise is now a requirement in many organizations to drive business decisions and operations. In fact, found that advanced analytics is in the top 5 global skills shortage highlighted by COVID-19.
Trend 2: Data visualization becomes mainstream
Dashboards can envelop data and present it in the most meaningful way at a glance. Interactive data visualization has evolved into a state-of-the-art solution. This enables data analysis to be more intuitive to the human mind, allowing business leaders to identify trends, patterns, and outliers that exists within a large data set.
Trend 3: Self-service Business Intelligence
Automated data reporting enables business leaders to respond almost immediately to the changing environment. Engineered decision intelligence can be used to track KPIs and prompt alerts to highlight key business information. This decision intelligence improves business management by eliminating bias which in turn helps an organization to make accurate and traceable decisions.
Trend 4: Cloud analytics
As we are seeing an artificial intelligence (AI) renaissance, where huge volumes of data are driving companies to resort to cloud-based analytics. This ensures wider data sharing, more efficient collaboration, rapid insights and reduced operational costs. By performing data analytics on the cloud, analysis can be performed in real-time or near real-time.
Trend 5: Predictive and prescriptive analytics
A lesson learnt from this pandemic is that our knowledge today may not necessarily remain a fact tomorrow. AI and machine learning algorithms that rely on historical data may no longer be as relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the business landscape. Hence, there will be stronger demand for modern AI and machine learning algorithms capable of working smarter with a smaller dataset to perform adaptive decision making.
