Happy New year, everyone.

May 2018 bring you happiness!

At this time of year it is traditional to look forward and make predictions for 2018.

This year, I thought it may be useful to look back at 2017, while planning for 2018.

Last year, I predicted that PoPI and GDPR would be major drivers for data management.

GDPR has been a definite focus for a number of our corporate clients, and for our international partner, Collibra.

With the May 2018 deadline looming, many South African firms with links to Europe are scrambling to meet the deadline.

Collibra’s GDPR accelerator provides a number of useful artefacts, many of which are also applicable to PoPI. Of course, technology does not deliver compliance, but the ability to assess and govern sensitive data according to the regulations is made easier through the use of Collibra and the accelerator.

Learn more about GDPR with the free GDPR compliance pitfalls to avoid ebook

Data in the Cloud will continue to grow

Governance of cloud data is an ongoing challenge, particularly for sensitive date. this was highlighted by the leak of personal information in October.

Data sharing agreements are no longer nice to have. Businesses must contract with both internal and external consumers of data to ensure that it is adequately protected.

Data Governance is moving to the business

The Chief Data Officer role has become more visible in the South African context (although no always with this title) and, increasingly, is being recognized as a business role.

In more and more clients, we are reporting to senior business executives – in many cases, with very little technical knowledge or background.

This reflects the new understanding that data is a business problem.

In spite of one issues such as Privacy and data in the cloud, the Chief Data Officer, seems primarily to be focused on data as a revenue enhancer and business differentiator..

In 2018, the Client Experience will drive data governance, data quality and big data initiatives.

Big data disappoints

In fact, during 2017 adoption of stacks such as Hadoop has taken off in the South African context.

But these seem mostly to be driven by an early adopter infrastructure business case. The data lake is being adopted to act as an archive and staging area for the data warehouse and other systems.

Challenges with governance – the average data scientist spends more than 60% of his time looking for data – and a lack of trust mean that big data analytics are yet to deliver real value for most organisations.

This year businesses must solve the governance problems in the data lake if they are to reap the benefits in 2019

 

Find out what our partners, Collibra, with their Data predictions for 2018 ebook