As IT leaders kick off the brand new yr throughout one of the vital tumultuous instances in current historical past, CIOs are being compelled to revisit their priorities to adapt and emerge by way of 2023 stronger than ever.
The previous few years have been terribly disruptive, and extra so for CIOs who’ve needed to speed up their digital transformation journey to maintain tempo with altering market traits, whereas additionally coping with cost-cutting measures in an financial downturn, staffing challenges and distant work, and an ever-increasing checklist of enterprise necessities for brand new digital companies.
With these adjustments, CIOs should rethink their agenda and reprioritize their objectives and investments to remain forward of evolving enterprise situations. Listed here are the highest 5 issues CIOs ought to give attention to as they put together for 2023:
Modernization of Information Platforms
For a lot of organizations, the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption – with many spanning two or extra cloud suppliers – however there are nonetheless many workloads nonetheless residing in on-prem information lakes like Hadoop, in addition to Cloud and Enterprise Information Warehouse shops similar to Oracle, Netezza, Teradata, and Greenplum that stay a burden on prices, assets and the power to be agile and innovate.
Whereas the licensing prices of sustaining these legacy programs usually attain hundreds of thousands of {dollars} yearly for bigger enterprises, licensing alone is often solely a part of the equation. {Hardware} upkeep and utilization can account for as a lot as 20% of the overall value, in addition to the DevOps burden that comes with supporting these programs.
Modernizing these applied sciences can be very important in 2023. And we already see it occurring at a number of the largest enterprises. Be aware of Nationwide, who improved the productiveness of their information engineers and information scientists by as a lot as 25%, accelerated their information pipelines 9x sooner by leveraging fashionable cloud-based analytics platforms, and migrated to new applied sciences like Databricks Lakehouse.
Tech Consolidation
It is no secret that the quantity of information – each structured and unstructured – continues to blow up by unimaginable quantities with the rise of cloud, cellular, social, AI and IoT information. There’s an unimaginable quantity of untapped potential for brand new information monetization and creating new merchandise; in consequence, there was an explosion of programs to handle all of it. Simply have a look at famed Matt Turck, VC at FirstMark, and his 2021 Machine Studying, AI and Information Panorama. As he mentions, the deluge of VC financings, unicorn creation and IPOs have resulted in a dizzying array of recent information and AI applied sciences (see for your self right here).
One of many largest priorities for CIOs can be to take again management of their information property and consolidate these programs. Having your total information crew handle all of those bespoke device chains simply is not sustainable and has resulted in tech bloat, inefficiencies, and missed alternatives. CIOs have extra strain than ever to stay aggressive, with the calls for to ship all these applied sciences at decrease prices. Consolidating and optimizing their tech stacks can be key.
The emergence of the lakehouse paradigm is one technique that an increasing number of corporations are using to consolidate their BI and AI infrastructure. The truth is, within the Gartner Hype Cycle for Information Administration, 2022, Gartner foresees that lakehouse adoption will attain vital mass within the subsequent 2-5 years. Underpinning the lakehouse expertise is the open-source expertise Delta Lake, a knowledge, analytics and AI workbench powered by the Linux basis. There’s a nice podcast on Matt Turck’s web page that includes Databrick’s CEO and founder, Ali Ghodsi, the place they dive into the historical past of lakehouse and its benefits.
Price Containment
There are numerous headwinds as we go into the brand new yr, so value containment will definitely be on the forefront of each CIO. Based on Gartner Senior Director Analyst, James Anderson, “It’s the position of the CIO to indicate to stakeholders how sure cuts will influence companies and the place financial savings are attainable”. 1 IT budgets are growing for many organizations, however inflation and rising prices will eat into new areas of funding, so there’s growing strain to scale back prices in current companies. Sunsetting legacy information platforms, consolidating distributors and optimizing cloud spending are just some of the methods CIOs can save assets and fund new and extra impactful innovation tasks.
Cloud migration tasks and tech consolidation will definitely assist with value containment, however they will not go far sufficient. IT leaders have to additionally take an in depth have a look at their current infrastructure and efficiency, notably relating to rising cloud information warehouse prices. Prices can shortly spiral uncontrolled, resulting in sticker shock with an increasing number of information and customers operating queries in opposition to the warehouse.
A method to make sure you are getting the very best bang to your buck out of your warehouse is to ascertain the next:
- Leverage a knowledge warehouse utilizing open codecs that do not change as shortly as proprietary information codecs
- Make the most of an structure that takes benefit of massively parallel processing
- Examine and undertake applied sciences that enhance each latency and throughput
That is precisely what Databricks Lakehouse and Databricks SQL have completed. Impressively, The Barcelona Supercomputing Heart, which offers the gold commonplace efficiency benchmarks for information warehousing, discovered that Databricks was 2.7x sooner with a 12x higher value efficiency in comparison with Snowflake. These enhancements in efficiency have a big impact in your cloud spending as information dimension will increase in manufacturing whereas taking part in an important position in value containment.
Living proof, corporations like Regeneron, who’re accelerating drug goal identification, can now get sooner insights and have diminished the time it takes to run queries on their total dataset from half-hour, down to three seconds – a 600x enchancment. Jeffrey Reid, Ph.D., Head of Genome Informatics at Regeneron mentioned, “The Databricks platform is enabling everybody in our built-in drug growth course of – from physician-scientists to computational biologists – to simply entry, analyze, and extract insights from all of our information.”
Unified Information Administration Structure
In 2023, CIOs might want to develop a unified information administration structure – a necessity pushed by the growing variety of information cloud platforms, as outlined in Matt Turck’s analysis. Orchestrating all of this information is essential, and current analysis reveals that 68% of CIOs say unifying their information platform for analytics and AI is essential.
With out a unified information structure, organizations usually construct a number of totally different stacks to deal with all of their information workloads, together with information warehousing, information lakes, ETL/information engineering, information streaming, enterprise intelligence (BI) and synthetic intelligence (AI). And every of those stacks requires very totally different applied sciences that won’t work effectively collectively, if in any respect. These organizations are painfully conscious of the excessive prices related to sustaining advanced system architectures and coping with vendor lock-in and proprietary options which might be gradual to evolve.
Sustaining such information silos over time with their related infrastructure and plumbing is now seen as pointless overhead that does not present any extra worth or aggressive benefit. Adopting a single expertise imaginative and prescient and structure in in the present day’s world is a should.
In a current information administration podcast, Habsah Nordin, Head of Enterprise Information in Group Digital for PETRONAS World, agrees. “That is the rationale why we recognized Databricks as one of many expertise stacks we’re going to construct throughout the EDH (enterprise information hub). That enables us to truly herald information and hook up with that throughout totally different information units, throughout all of the purposes and information platforms.”
Danger Administration
Danger, governance, compliance and safety have lengthy been basic information challenges as information leaders try to construct belief of their information fashions each internally and externally. Unhealthy-quality information results in inaccurate analytics, poor decision-making, value overhead, and destructive enterprise influence. Gartner estimates that poor information high quality prices organizations a median of $12.9 million yearly. An efficient information governance technique should embrace a give attention to information high quality in order that the provenance of information will be identified, guidelines will be enforced on the info, and adjustments will be tracked to construct belief within the outcomes.
Information governance encapsulates the insurance policies and practices to securely handle the info belongings inside a corporation. Leveraging a unified strategy to managing information and analytics helps information leaders handle the commonest challenges when modernizing their threat administration practices. They will undertake a extra agile strategy when their information can serve a number of threat administration use instances and they’re not restricted to the slim view of their particular person use case. Strong information governance can even assist optimize prices by stopping customers from needlessly beginning up massive information clusters, and by creating guardrails for utilizing costly graphics processing unit situations.
At Rolls-Royce, which builds plane engines, governance is each exterior and inside. “The governance that we undergo at Rolls-Royce might be a lot greater than I might’ve dreamt of after I was in a type of small agile startups,” mentioned Stuart Hughes, Chief Info and Digital Officer for Rolls-Royce.
“We created a knowledge passport course of to know the lineage of the entire information, the place it got here from, what it may be used for and the place we’re going to put it. So any information that comes into Rolls-Royce from an engine, from a buyer, or some information that we generate from these information units, goes by way of a really constant course of the place it is reviewed.”
Information-driven IT leaders have to give attention to the timeliness, completeness and accuracy of their information. Governance capabilities, together with auditing, retention and lineage, have develop into important, notably contemplating current privateness rules.
In Abstract
CIOs should be attuned to the most recent traits in digital transformation, cloud computing, governance, and information administration and analytics with a purpose to successfully lead their group’s IT technique. By staying updated with these initiatives and prioritizing them within the new yr, CIOs may help their organizations keep forward of the curve and stay aggressive in an more and more disruptive world.
Be taught extra about how expertise executives can remodel and scale your group with information, analytics and ai right here.
1 How CIOs Can Optimize IT Prices – Gartner
