Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Data Intensity will be the new KPI
By Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Innovation Officer, SingleStore
For many organizations the pandemic has turned digital transformation from a nice-to-have, multi-year project into an urgent necessity. Wherever a company was on the digital transformation and cloud journey at the onset of the pandemic, they are further along today. Now that we have proven to ourselves that transformation can happen quickly and that it can be done, we are imagining the next steps. If a CIO previously thought about what the business would be like if storage costs could be reduced by 20% it is time to start thinking bigger around data and analytics. Based on our own experiences over the past 18 months, it is time to unlimit our thinking.
How would you run the business if you no longer had to worry about the cost associated with data, but only the potential? What if data was accessible anywhere, virtually free and with low latency, and if anyone could compute or access any desired outcome at the right time with no risk?
The concepts of data intensity and complexity will be widely adopted in the coming years to measure digital dexterity, as organizations need to drive data intensity without adding complexity. Data intensity increases naturally as more constraints are connected to the data: variety, volume or velocity, geographic distribution, diverse types and structure, diverse use cases, automation privacy, security, number of producers and consumers.
Data intensity further increases as organizations evolve from being data-driven to being model-driven. In a data-driven business data is used to run the business, in a model-driven business, models derived from data are the business. In the model-driven world, businesses differentiate on their real-time pricing, recommendation engine, revenue prediction, credit scoring and supply chain optimization models.
Data intensity is positive, but if not properly managed will lead to complexity that adds cost and friction. While data intensity today is mostly an attribute of applications, I predict that by 2024 the majority of organizations will have objectives, key results and KPIs tied to data intensity to capture their digital maturity.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oliver Schabenberger is Chief Innovation Officer at SingleStore. He is a former academician and seasoned technology executive with more than 25 years of global experience in data management, advanced analytics, and AI. Oliver was previously COO and CTO at SAS, leading software innovation. Oliver holds Master of Science and PhD degrees from Virginia Polytechnic.
