It’s impossible to be successful in the business world if one only focuses on what’s happening in the present moment. While this is certainly important for daily maintenance, so much of running a company involves looking forward to what’s down the line. In fact, this is a huge part of data analytics as a whole.
Of course, you want to immediately improve processes and make your organization operate more efficiently. However, an additional advantage of data analytics is its ability to prepare your company for the future by leveraging competitive advantages today. So, what’s in store for the future of data? Here are a few predictions of what might be in store for 2018.
Artificial Intelligence Will Grow in Relevance
Artificial Intelligence has recently been a hot topic. There’s good reason for this. AI is poised to completely change the way humans interact with the world. Data analytics is one of the fields that is going to see a massive influx in AI applications.
For example, there’s a ton of valuable information hidden in massive pools of collected data. This is data that isn’t easily understandable, such as text or other things more complex than numbers. Using AI, data engineers will be able to extract actionable information more efficiently than ever before.
Greater Exchange of Data
Data is extremely valuable. It should be considered a resource by anyone who’s able to collect and store it. And like all resources, there’s a monetary value to all kinds of data. The future will likely bring a more open marketplace of data sharing.
Think of going to the grocery store to pick out what you want for dinner. What if you could do the same thing with data? You see that another firm has a set of data that will be extremely helpful to your company. Either you can take the time to collect that information on your own—a time- and money-consuming affair—or you can buy that data. Chances are that purchasing the data will be more efficient. Plus, this will allow companies to make a greater return on collected data.
Exchanging data offers companies more than just monetary value though. The more organizations pool or share their data, the more insights can be pulled using data analytics. This means companies can do more with their data, find more solutions and make greater advances.
Wider Adoption of User-Friendly Software
In the past, data science has been dominated by experts. And for good reason. Only trained experts were able to pull and interpret insights from data stores.
The future of data analytics, however, will be much more in the hands of everyday people. This will largely be due to the proliferation of user-friendly software. Relational search is one of the best new examples of software simplifying data analysis. This basically works like a Google search for data. Users can input their search terms and immediately get a synthesized readout. Imagine the applicability of this for financial data analytics!
Users can instantly get up-to-date data that can then be used to make rapid decisions for something like buying or selling securities. Widening the pool of people able to utilize data analytics will inherently afford more insights.
The Cloud Will Grow
The cloud is all around us. And it’s only going to continue growing in 2018 and beyond. ‘The cloud’ is a term given to computing that happens over the Internet through remote servers. Many data analytics software companies are now designing their products to work exclusively over the cloud.
There are a few benefits to this system. First, it can be accessed anywhere there’s a connection to the Internet. This is extremely handy for global companies, or businesses that require people to work off-campus. Additionally, all data is backed up to the cloud. This means that you won’t lose all that valuable information in the event of an internal system failure.
The year ahead is shaping up to be a big one for data analytics. While it’s impossible to predict exactly what’s in store for the future, it’s safe to assume data is going to play a major role in it.
