Data Trends to Look Out for in 2021
Almost every aspect of life and work has been changed by the pandemic. In just a few short months, the working environment changed beyond recognition.
In June 2020, Analytics Engines conducted a survey which found that the COVID-19 crisis had had a measurable impact on businesses adoption of data analytics and emerging technologies. 46.2% of respondents to the survey stated that the pandemic has increased their market scoping and implementation rate.
Respondents also stated that the pandemic had highlighted the importance of data in being able to identify new opportunities, more adequately respond to threats, and to better understand their own business and marketplace.
In 2021, and with perhaps a greater willingness to adopt digital technologies as part of the new normal, what technologies and trends will shape the business environment?
Empowering Business Domain Specialists
In their Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 report, Gartner identified the democratisation of technology as an emerging technology trend; a trend that we believe will continue in 2021 and beyond. Specifically, the adoption of low-code, no-code data analytics solutions designed to empower business domain experts and remove skills resource bottlenecks.
The growing demand for low-code, no-code data analytics is supported further by a 2019 report from The Royal Society which found that between 2013 and 2018 demand for Data Scientists and Data Engineers rose by 1287% and 452% respectively – compared to an increase of just 36% for all types of workers during the same period.
Skills shortages such as these mean that for many organisations seeking to adopt data analytics and emerging technologies into their operations, low-code, no-code data analytics solutions will not only be desirable, but essential.
Contextual and Semantic Search
At Analytics Engines, we’ve previously written about the impact of semantic search and understanding. In short, Semantic Search and Understanding is about enabling users to explore data based on intent, concepts, and ideas, rather than specific keywords.
As low-code, no-code data analytics solutions become more commonplace, the technology supporting these solutions will evolve to meet the demands of the business user rather than the data scientist. Semantic Search and natural language understanding will become even more essential to empowering business domain experts to draw meaningful insights from the data that is important to them.
Blending Internal and External Data Sources
The starting point for exploiting data is naturally to analyse and evaluate an organisation’s owned data. At Analytics Engines, we have seen an increasing demand for this owned data to be blended with external data sources in order to produce a fuller, richer, more complete understanding of their business environment.
The clearest example of this can be seen in the AML/KYC process, where organisations will review internal and client documentation in additional external data found in Companies House, County Court Judgments, or the Estates Gazette.
Businesses are looking for deeper, more powerful insights – whether to identify and onboard new clients or to perform due diligence checks – to improve knowledge and support decision making within companies.
Insight Search & Discovery
In their Top Strategic Tech Trends for 2021 report, Gartner identified “Intelligent composable business” as an emerging trend for the year ahead. They go on to define an “Intelligent composable business” as one that: Enables better access to information; Can augment that information with new insights; Is composable, modular, and can change and respond more quickly as decisions are made.
Combined, semantic search, natural language understanding, blended enriched data sources and low-code, no-code data analytics solutions present organisations of all sizes with a unique opportunity and provide them with the tools that they need in order to become resilient, reactive, intelligent composable businesses.
Search & Discovery and Insights Engines provide organisations with resources they need to adopt data analytics and emerging technologies into their operations, without relying on data scientists and software engineers.
Depending on the application, they enable organisations to make sense of the noise within their data and build clear, concise, and most importantly, understandable picture of their operations, the market environment, their customers, and their networks.
MINERVA
Tying in with these emerging trends, we are bringing our own insight corporate search and discovery engine MINERVA to market. MINERVA goes beyond keywords and searches based on ideas and concepts to find the connections, patterns, and behaviours that they need to know about.
MINERVA’s low code, no code UI places the power of advanced data analytics and emerging technologies into the hands of your subject matter experts, helping to eliminate technology and resource bottlenecks and to help users find new opportunities and to de-risk decision making.
This means your data is easy to gather, easy to augment, easy to search – and all provided and visualised through a no-code ‘point and click’ interface.
To learn more about Analytics Engines and MINERVA, contact us using the form below.
