3 Predictions for Data and Analytics in 2022

Not sure about you but 2021 seems to have passed at warp speed. Feels like only yesterday the year was starting - maybe it's been the relentless barrage of zoom calls, lack of any substantial vacation or the absence of in office collaboration that's melded the days into a continuous stream. Not that its been monotonous or unproductive - quite the contrary, 2021 has been a big year for data. The inertia we carry into 2022 has the potential to make next year even more significant for all of us working in this field.

1. The Chief Analytics Officer will rise in 2022

In 2015 I wrote an article on the rise of the Chief Data Officer - back then only a single digit percentage of the Fortune 500 had a CDO. This year Peter and Caroline had over 450 graduates from their CDO Summer School. The CDO role is often misunderstood by the business, who consider it a universal for all things data - it is of course more nuanced than that and CDOs are (very) often overworked and under resourced. That's compounded when a business hires a CDO and wrongly assumes a data driven culture will magically appear - I see the CAO emerging as a specialism in its own right and owning the agenda of turning data into value. This has begun to appear via the hybrid CDAO role but further specialisation is required. My hope is the CDO will finally have an ally in the important work of creating value from data - to be truly effective though, they need the delivery capacity to turn strategy into reality.

2. Data Engineers will finally be recognised for their sex appeal

Data science is the current owner of the world's sexiest career crown. In 2022 that crown could slip. Data science has enjoyed a honeymoon period where building an 'AI capability' (sic) was more important than producing a return from that investment. As Leo Reyes explained in the Data Leaders Executive Lounge - the rush to hire talent from a (very) limited pool and the propensity to search for a unicorn that is expert in all things data - not just building models - companies have failed to operationalise models and data scientists have expended far more time, wrangling data, than they have writing algorithms.

This has taken the sheen off data science and resulted in frustration for both employer and employee. The unsung hero in all this is the data engineer and 2022 could be their year. Data engineers have the potential to become a force multiplier in the race to value - for their ability to leverage the incredible capabilities of a modern tech stack and run transformations at infinite scale on cloud platforms. Building data science and advanced analytics capabilities will move from being all about data scientists to a data science pod - that includes, frontend data visualisation experts, commercial analysts and data engineers. Like my prediction that the CDO and CAO will specialise, data engineers will allow data science teams to specialise and the unicorn can slip back into mythology - where it belongs.

3. No code will be embraced by developers - or at least tolerated

There has always been friction between development and analytics teams, they speak a different language, use different tools and are well, different. In digital transformation though, they serve that same business goal - turn data to insight and insight to value. As cloud first, gives way to cloud only, adoption needs to move beyond the confides of technologists and into the hands of subject matter experts. For that to happen, data movement and transformation can no longer be solely hand coded - it needs to have a visual interface that allows analysts to work with data in an agile way. Not to say there isn't a place for coding - there certainly is, it's extremely flexible (assuming you manage your code base well) - and code will always solve the most complex use cases better than a GUI - but is every use case an edge case?

Doubtful.

The role of no code / low code is to lower the barrier to entry for your existing analysts, rather than up-skilling them to code. In a stroke, you create a bridge from that shiny new cloud data lake house you've loving coded to the dashboards that the business actually runs on. In this brave new world of accepting our different skills - developers can still write their code but analysts can do their own transformations and that's key to getting business leaders to trust the data so they take action on it.

Signing off on 2021

Would love to get your comments on these predictions in the comments and hear your ideas of what 2022 holds for data and analytics. I'm sure that Dave, Jez and I will be discussing this and more in the Data Leaders Executive Lounge on January 20th - Whatever your position, 2022 is shaping up to be a great year for data. Now though, it's the holidays and time to spend it with your loved ones - hope you get everything you wished for this season AND more!