Data Trends- Data unification, privacy-preserving analytics and more......

Last week, I got to attend LatentView's 2023 Analytics Roundtable in San Francisco, which had the theme of "Breaking Silos, Amplifying Results through Data." The conference emphasized the importance of breaking down silos in enterprises to get the most out of data. The overarching theme was democratizing data and the entire event reinforced the importance of this for companies across all industries.

Over a day long event conference, leaders from multiple industries presented their insights over the last few decades and also share how they envision the next move in data industry. LatentView also teased plans for a major growth marketing focus and solutions offering. The company is focusing on empowering its customers to use data analytics to supercharge their growth marketing initiatives.

The advertising industry is rapidly shifting from data-driven to privacy focused due to consumer demand and emerging regulations. Who could be a better person to learn this from other than Harikesh Nair who leads the data science team powering ads measurement for Google's ads including Search, Display, Youtube/TV. Harikesh spoke about the shift towards "Privacy Preserving Advertising." The key challenges facing the industry include attribution, reach, trust, and measurement. Measurement is crucial for advertisers, publishers, and AdTech companies to know where to invest, showcase value, and optimize spend. With the end of third-party cookies coming in 2024, companies are working on solutions that align with evolving regulations. The future of advertising will rest upon good first-party data, automation, and privacy-preserving technologies. Privacy Preserving Technologies (e.g., Google’s Privacy Sandbox and others) will be important, with new APIs made available to all downstream players. Going forward, privacy-preserving technology and methodologies will become more prevalent and will subsequently give birth to more advanced AI/ML to reduce data noise and bring all this siloed data together.

The followed session was talking about building resilient framework for connected data in the supply chain industry. Supply chain professionals have been grappling with the concept of supply chain resilience as a result of recent global supply chain disruptions. The definition of supply chain resilience has evolved and companies must think proactively about measuring vulnerability in the supply chain. The panel session with Pavan Heda , Raj Menon and Sunder Balakrishnan emphasized about data democratization across the organization to identify vulnerabilities, rank risks, and prioritize action. Supply chain leaders must lean into data to measure vulnerability and improve their supply chain networks. Companies must anticipate potential risks and align leadership to prioritize action in order to build a future-ready supply chain network.

The problem facing most enterprises is not a lack of data. Companies today have more data than they know what do with. They should be evaluating real-time data streaming architectures are becoming more sophisticated with platforms such as Snowflake and Apache Spark, which are enabling companies to optimize their DataOps and not just store more data via the cloud but move data from insight to action. These data cloud solutions are helping companies move from collecting to connecting data by breaking down data silos that are the root cause of disconnected supply chains.

Moving from the scope of supply chain, the next panel with Kavita Vazirani , Henry Bzeih , Ram Balasubramanian and Vivek Singh explored the space of democratizing data and ensuring cross functional data utilization.

Data democratization is gaining importance among companies, but organizational silos and legacy data culture are preventing progress. One such example is Southwest Airlines’ scheduling technology, SkySolver, which led to the grounding of nearly 8,000 flights last holiday season, due to its reliance on outdated data sources and architectures. To overcome these barriers, forward-thinking leaders are promoting data democratization and incorporating it into the company's DNA. This requires changing behaviors and beliefs within an organization and encouraging everyone to use data for decision-making.

Kavita Vazirani from The Walt Disney Company faced the challenge of geographic data silos at Comcast NBC. There were different P&Ls and marketing mix models, and 25 agencies were buying media at different rates. To overcome this, the strategy was to centralize the media buying process while decentralizing information. Analytics leaders must embrace relentless collaboration to succeed, Kavita reiterated.

For any company investing in data tools, the data and business teams need to work together transparently (and have access to decentralized data) to succeed. Companies can also look to set up data Centers of Excellence (CoEs) that tap into cross-functional collaboration and data sharing to drive innovation.

Low-code and no-code platforms are helping bridge the gap and allow for data to flow freely across apps and decision-making processes. Like anything, cultural change takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. A solid strategy is to tackle one thing at a time and view data democratization as a journey. Once you tackle one silo, it catches on with stakeholders and leadership and the next one will fall much easier as the value becomes more apparent.

The final section of the conference was a firechat with Yelak Biru, MSc and Krishnan Venkata where they spoke about "Data for greater good" which can be for organizations, their processes, their people, for the society- tackling a disease or environmental issues. Yelak Biru has an interesting career arc that touches all these aspects in a very compelling way. Yelak Biru, a seasoned professional with experience in data management, has witnessed the importance of breaking down data silos at several well-known companies. At PepsiCo, Yelak worked on an inventory management initiative to forecast demand and improve the entire supply chain. Breaking down data silos was essential to understanding demand forecasting, which ultimately led to freeing up money and reducing excess inventory. At Walmart, Yelak moved from an IT role to a business role with HR, where he helped improve the HR processes through data democratization. Yelak’s current role with the International Myeloma Foundation is a non-profit organization that works towards improving the quality of life for myeloma patients and finding a cure. He has seen the importance of breaking down data silos in the healthcare industry and using data for the greater good of society.

There was so much to learn from these leaders and their expanded career over decade where they have seen how digitization and data has really changed the face of how organizations operate.

The takeaways from this roundtable were to compete and thrive in a highly competitive digital economy, companies must embrace a mindset and execution plan for data democratization. This requires exploring and tapping into new data sources in the face of emerging privacy regulations, taking a proactive stance to business continuity and resilience using data, leveraging cloud-native solutions and platforms to unify and accelerate decision making, and pushing to build a data-centric culture from the top down and the ground up.