10 Data and Analytics Trends to Keep on Your Radar

Our annual list of top data and analytics (D&A) trends intends to help you anticipate change and transform uncertainty into opportunity. Factor them into key investments that drive new growth, efficiency, resilience and innovation. 

This year’s trends fit into three broad themes: 

• Think like a business.

• Move from platforms to ecosystems.

• Don’t forget the humans.

“These trends must be fundamental to the way organizations approach their D&A strategy and that team’s relationship with other cross-enterprise stakeholders,” says Gartner VP Analyst Gareth Herschel. “The mission of data and analytics teams is to go from managing data resources and creating analytic insight, to delivering value. This need to deliver provable value at scale is driving a variety of trends.”

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These trends deliver provable value to organizations at scale and focus on the “why,” rather than just the how and what of data and analytics. A few of the trends fall into more than one theme, so we’ve included them multiple times below.

These trends allow the D&A function to focus on adopting a proactive approach to delivering value while also accepting the responsibility for the implications of its activities.

• Value optimization drives focus on business impact.

• Managing your AI risk explores the risks and rewards of adopting new technologies.

• Data sharing is essential to enabling access to the right data at the right time to derive the right insight.

• D&A sustainability acknowledges the energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts of D&A and AI, while also assessing its impact on making many activities more sustainable, and helping businesses and wider society meet ESG goals.

• Observability drives focus on understanding the expenses of analytic activity.

These trends have emerged primarily to establish a more agile and complete way of integrating data and analytics into the greater organization.

• Data sharing is essential to understanding the organizational ecosystem.

• D&A sustainability connects an organization’s behavior to its impact on the broader ecosystem.

• Observability traces the flow of data and insight throughout that ecosystem.

• Practical data fabric enables the construction of the ecosystem.

• Emergent AI will transform the ecosystem, especially by integrating humans in new ways.

• Converged and composable ecosystems are the new technological bedrock for systems delivery.

These trends are a necessary rallying cry for organizations that have become too data-centric — and in turn lost touch with their employee engagement and their broader responsibilities.

• Managing your AI risk is the recognition that AI delivers unpredictable impacts that require careful governance.

• D&A sustainability explores the impact of data and analytics on the environment and our quality of life.

• Emergent AI transforms the relationship between humans and organizational systems.

• Consumers become creators reflects business users going from passive consumers of insights to actively engaged insight creators.

• Humans remain the decision makers acknowledges that humans lead the decision-making system.

Gareth Herschel is a VP Analyst with Gartner. He primarily researches the alignment of data and analytics with organizational culture and decision making.