2017 In Data Trends: What to Watch For Next Year
By When the year starts winding down, we know we'll see two types of readings come up in our regular news crawls: we'll either see retrospectives of what was big this year or what likely will be big next year. These articles serve a great purpose, allowing us to consider an entire year in one space, and frame our considerations accordingly. The data analysis market is no different here, and a recent report from Infogix emerged about what would likely be big in data for 2017.
Some of the predictions are fairly standard fare: big data will continue its rise, which has been the case for the last couple of years now. Hadoop will continue to make an impact on the market. Analytics will become increasingly popular with businesses. Many of these are just points of ellipsis on predictions made last year and sometimes years before.
However, some new trends are starting to emerge for next year as well, and these bear attention. One prediction calls for a rise in big data as a means to augment customer experience. Using big data operations to track customers' movements both in-store and online will help figure out what's going well and what isn't in an operation and allow companies to improve on both sides of the equation. Not only that, it will also be useful in determining merchandise stocking; if it's not selling well, it will likely be out.
There will also be a move on toward improving efficiency by using more self-service data preparation; the tools to analyze and derive insights from data will be particularly valuable during this time, which means less use of development teams to manipulate numbers, and more use of individuals analyzing their own data with provided tools.
Plus, there will be a clearer convergence on several technological fronts, as the early days of the Internet of Things (IoT) come into their own, bringing together those elements along with the cloud, big data operations, and appropriate cybersecurity measures to help keep all that data safe as well as thoroughly analyzed.
Essentially, businesses are realizing that there's a lot more data being generated every year, and it's high time that data did some good. It's never enough to just have it; it has to be used to do any good for businesses whatsoever, and that means the tools required to use all that data will be increasingly popular and valuable. Of course, that data has to be protected—it's a massive lure for hackers—so the relevant security measures need to likewise be put in play even as we use these new tools.
Having data is important. Using data is crucial. The trends for 2017 look to realize as much, and soon, we'll likely be seeing more companies putting all that data to work to generate better customer experiences.
Edited by Maurice Nagle