Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Analytics Insight on 2021 and Beyond

By Executives from Alteryx

2020 has been a year unlike any other, with unforeseen challenges creating hurdles for businesses in every sector of the economy. As companies look for ways to insulate themselves from future shocks while preparing for the year ahead, insider insights can help companies to understand how societal and economic trends have and will impact their industries and what to expect in 2021. Executives from analytics giant Alteryx have developed a list of predictions that will help business leaders stay ahead of the curve and tackle anything that 2021 throws at them.

Sharmila Mulligan, Chief Strategy Officer and CMO

Self-reliance will become critical to high productivity.

2020 challenged many of our perceptions on the nature of work, and companies are now bracing for a world where a prolonged “new normal” looks much more likely than a return to the status quo. Those coping with these changes have found that it is more important than ever to cut costs and handle as much as possible in-house. Whether it is determining how to set up their own IT processes or doing analytics, self-reliance will be critical to high productivity.

Citizen analysts will increasingly upskill to become data scientists

The growing complexity of most industries and companies also means that once we see self-reliance in terms of developing IT processes or using analytics, there will quickly be a huge push to expand that skillset further. With the market erratically changing from month to month there will be a much greater emphasis placed on data science than ever before. This, in turn, will drive more citizen analysts to upskill to become data scientists.

HR analytics will separate the remote workforce winners and losers.

Every business has faced unprecedented challenges over the past year, so how will companies leverage data and analytics to overcome hurdles? One solution that will continue to rapidly gain favor is to combine data and analytics with data science and integrated processes to strengthen operations and insulate businesses from future challenges. This could allow them to analyze workforce health, conduct employee flight risk analysis or analyze and predict safe reopening for offices. In a world where we are all working remotely, we’ll see smart companies implementing the right tools and tech to maintain standards while making the traditionally complicated tasks more accessible by placing a greater emphasis on a single platform versus a kludged together solution.

AI-driven supply chain analytics will learn to see around corners.

The COVID pandemic has made it clear that the world still depends on robust manufacturing and supply chains. As businesses gear up not just to survive, but to thrive in the era of social distancing, predictive analytics will further emerge as a crucial tool for mitigating risks, managing volatility and offsetting risk. During the pandemic we saw forecasting models and processes simply break down. With supply chains more complex and dynamic than ever, moving forward it will be crucial that they be augmented, automated and enhanced through the support of analytics processing that matches their sophistication. 

Alan Jacobson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer

Upskilling will play a bigger role in every corporate culture.

While it is always important for companies to offer training to employees, the fields of data science and digital transformation are challenging companies to break the mold and deliver new and constantly evolving  ways to upskill and deliver ROI. More and more, we’re going to see upskilling programs that help people learn and apply skills in real time. Hackathons are one example of how this is happening currently in many companies. We’re going to see an expansion of these and other on the job experiences that use real data and real problems with a goal of creating real value. Data science has evolved to the point where people don’t need to go back to college to learn, they’ll learn on the job by encountering new tools and technologies.

The “analytic divide” is going to get worse.

Like the much-publicized “digital divide” we’re also seeing the emergence of an “analytic divide.” Many companies were driven to invest in analytics due to the pandemic, while others have been forced to cut anything they didn’t view as critical to keep the lights on – and a proper investment in analytics was, for these organizations, one of the first items on the chopping block. This means that the analytic divide will further widen in 2021, and this trend will continue for many years to come.  Without a doubt, the winners and losers in any industry will continue to be defined by those that are leveraging analytics and those that are not.

Analytics platforms and processes will increasingly outperform ad-hoc, siloed solving.

Businesses are already starting to democratize data across the organization, arming more employees with real-time insights. I see this happening in the very near future as both a cultural shift and a technology shift, and it means highly trained data gurus and citizen data scientists will increasingly join forces as part of a more holistic and effective problem-solving process.

Libby Duane Adams, Chief Advocacy Officer

Companies will be more ready to question the status quo and to close the skills gap.

The past year has taught us that we cannot take stability for granted, so just because something has been done a certain way in the past, that is no longer a valid reason in and of itself to maintain the status quo. Leaders need to listen to new ideas and empower people at every level of the organization to make changes. Happy and engaged employees deliver a delightful experience to the customer which will lead to a greater customer experience. This pervasive uncertainly and need to embrace change means that a key trend in 2021 will (and certainly needs to) be an increased investment in the upskilling of staff. Fundamentally, it is skilled people and teams who build products and deliver great services. Those leaders who invest in their teams will be able to seamlessly continue modernization and bring the next generation of products and services to market.

In the future, employee engagement will depend heavily on bringing more employees into the data fold.

There have been many drawbacks to the new work environment created by COVID, but in the remote work set up, speed of insight has been increased as employees feel empowered and are able to accomplish more while getting to insights faster than before. In other words, data democratization has and will continue to spur better questions and new thinking as employees are uplifted. The more access to data that workers have, the better questions they will be able to ask, the more complex problems they will be able to solve  – and not have to work so hard to do so.

Derek Knudsen, Chief Technology Officer

The role of CTO will continue to evolve; Holistically supporting employees in remote environments will be critical 

The role of a CTO is always evolving, but as we move into 2021 much tighter coordination, cooperation and integration will happen between this role and that of HR and other corporate functions. With remote work, or some hybrid of remote and on-premise work, here to stay for many companies, CTOs will be focused not just on providing remote connectivity, but also on ensuring this enables positive working conditions, as well as supporting the physical and mental wellbeing of employees.

Customized business systems will start to displace off-the-shelf remote working.

Over the coming year, we’ll see increased investment in customizing existing business systems to address the nuances of the new remote business environment. While it feels natural to optimize to your business, it makes those implementations more fragile while simultaneously making upgrades harder and creating significant hurdles when it is time to migrate to a new platform. Those looking to circumvent the stress involved with adopting a new platform must remember that many of today’s enterprise business systems have proven process templates and that it is easier to adjust process, not software. 

Analytics pros will find creative ways around budget cuts

A study from Junaid showed a decrease in spending for data and analytics in 2020.This is a misstep as now more than ever it is important to get the greatest possible productivity out of employees. To compensate, analytics professionals will focus on consuming IT capabilities from companies that they know and trust, in particular they’ll look to larger enterprises that are known entities vs emerging players. With such tight budgets, there is no room to risk working with an unproven partner. 

Data democratization will become the new norm

It’s the job of the CDO to ensure expansion of growth across the entire business. This can be achieved by providing structured data that people can actually use. A successful CDO should democratize data so that it’s accessible and understandable by people. A good CTO will complement the CDO by creating the necessary tooling to find the required data. This means giving users a set of visualization tools and reporting tools that allow them to get after the data to run insights. As we move into 2021, we’ll continue to see further and tighter collaboration between these two roles, driven by necessity. If you have tools with bad data, you’re exacerbating the data challenge. If you have limited tools, only a small subset can do anything with the data.

Billy Spears, Chief Information Security Officer

Zero-trust security will become the new normal

The work-from-anywhere concept has created an interesting opportunity for CISOs to consider strategic approaches for managing non-traditional security risks. To accommodate this shift, we’ll see corporate security departments expanding the perimeter into associates’ homes to ensure that cyber risks are not unknowingly introduced into the corporate network. 2021 will see CISOs working with HR, further pushing to increase each associate’s cyber awareness to proactively recognize and report related risks, meaning that “zero-trust security” will be the new standard methodology for supporting associates working remotely. CISOs must adopt this model as it improves secure access to corporate resources through continuous assessment and intent-based authentication policies. Furthermore, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections must become a default setting to increase protections for associates requiring remote access.   

Citizen data scientists will play a bigger role in preventing cyber attacks in 2021

As workers everywhere become more comfortable working with data, the ability of a business to deliver value in data processing and analysis increases exponentially. Their ever-expanding skillset increases value by delivering actionable insights from terabytes of otherwise impenetrable data to help the company forecast, mitigate risk and fraud, deliver relevant products to their customers and improve cybersecurity defensiveness. Effective cybersecurity threat hunting has always been built around the constant pursuit, near capture and repeated escapes of adversaries attempting to infiltrate a corporate network. Using a powerful analytics platform that enables machine learning capabilities is crucial to detect and address cybersecurity threats more rapidly by providing security departments with the ability to examine large volumes of data to uncover trends, identify patterns and deliver actionable intelligence. With the further democratization of data, 2021 will see citizen data scientists more and more playing a key role in helping security teams enhance and simplify their cyber defense technologies by precisely detecting future attacks, proactively identifying security blind spots across the network and protecting valuable company information. 

Mark Anderson, Chief Executive Officer

Increased buyer sophistication and demand for greater automation

If nothing else, the past six months has crystalized the acute need and significant challenges companies face when they have disparate legacy systems in place. This is pushing companies to innovate faster than ever before. Moving forward, we’ll see smarter and more sophisticated infrastructure purchases, with companies demanding fewer vendors, less complexity and much greater automation. This will have a marked impact across industries in 2021.

Only true frontrunners will be tying data to the P&L

As we move into 2021, smart companies are looking at data and how they leverage that data as a key asset, but only the most innovative will be tying this to their P&L. Harnessing that data and truly productizing it is still a ways off for most. 

Self-service and simplicity will win the day

The pandemic has shown businesses that overly complex and rigid systems are more of a hindrance than a help when you have to pivot quickly. Businesses will move further toward flexible platforms and self-service infrastructure that enables employees and businesses to turn on a dime when needed. And, as businesses continue to be remote or partially remote, employees will need and demand eloquent and accessible self-service capabilities in order to remain highly functioning in these distributed work environments.

Dean Stoecker, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board

New leadership techniques must emerge to manage remote workforces

The lingering effects of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic will be felt long after we have found a vaccine and this threat to public health has passed.  The changes that we will see in the year to come offer a clear look at how the nature of work is set to be changed forever. What we do will not change, but where work is conducted will continue to evolve. Despite what some industry leaders are saying about being excited to get back to the office, I don’t anticipate a return to the status quo. Now, the challenge for leaders will be the way we engage the workforce to continue to innovate, collaborate and optimally execute for the benefit of customers. I believe an over-reliance on machines and technology rather than human, face-to-face interaction will lead to a more disconnected workforce that struggles to find its purpose. Tomorrow’s leaders must be prepared to meet these challenges head on and keep employees happy, productive and innovative.

It will be more crucial to upskill the workforce

One obvious trend that will continue through 2021 is businesses will further expand their investment in upskilling employees as the virtual work environment continues. In particular, data literacy. To truly accomplish this, first companies must liberate their data and make it accessible to the everyday worker who is curious and willing to challenge the status quo. Second, the same technologies that enable answers to arise from the context of the question must amplify the skills of the user. What we’ll ultimately see is a surge in code-free and code-friendly platforms as the key for upskilling the workforce to drive long term growth and success in digital transformation.

Companies must stay on the right side of the growing “digital divide”

In the technology sector, the COVID-19 pandemic separated the haves from the have nots in terms of digital readiness. As the world rebounds and business investments in work-from-home technologies accelerated, we have seen things that no one would have predicted just a year ago – like Zoom achieving a higher market cap than IBM. This offers a preview of things to come in 2021 and beyond. As we move forward, the winners in every sector will be the companies willing to significantly change working practices, bring everyone in the company along on the journey by democratizing data and amplifying human intelligence so every worker has the ability to drive business value.

Leaders must empower employees through technology

Over the coming year, it will become apparent that in order to achieve success in a competitive market, companies have an immediate need to  shift focus and embrace a model that provides insights faster and speed decision making. To achieve this every worker needs to be incentivized to value all data as an asset that can support the business. Technology must be implemented that allows workers to easily find the data assets  relevant to a question, technology that allows them to organize and prepare the disparate data and finally technology that creates analytic pipelines that can be shared and automated so as to continually inform the business. Mainstream implementation of artificial intelligence technologies can never happen unless we leverage the data and amplify human intelligence first.

Greater focus on data and analytics is here to stay

COVID-19 forced us to address an enormous amount of challenges and in doing so, drove an intense focus on data and analytics to provide much-needed needed insight. From genome sequencing to understand the virus and its mutations, to the spatial analytics helping us track its spread, to the prediction of its peak states, to anticipating the needs of healthcare workers to managing the rollout of trillions of dollars of government aid. Because the virus has also served to place a spotlight on other areas where society is failing its most vulnerable, we are now more acutely aware of the need to be more curious about the problems the world faces; homelessness, addiction, healthcare, security, social justice and more. Post pandemic, data science best practices also have the potential to provide efficient and innovative ways to also help tackle some of these fundamental real-world problems.

Data-driven transformation will equip innovators for future success

It’s no secret that this year has been challenging for businesses as they seek to adopt new models that put them in a position to succeed and continue operations during an unprecedented public health crisis. While there is every reason to be optimistic about the ability of researchers and public health professionals to bring about the end of the coronavirus, the world on January 1, 2021 will likely look much as it does now. To succeed in the coming year will require a full retooling of operations in order to unleash the potential of every employees. Organizations that create and enable a data-driven culture, one where any question can be asked of any data set, by any data worker to support most any use case will survive and thrive even if market conditions worsen. Digitally aware and technologically-equipped organizations will fare well and those that refuse to embrace new ways of thinking will fall behind. Refusing to adapt is not an option, and those that stick with the status quo instead of adopting a bold new approach will continue to lose ground even after the worst of the pandemic and its associated economic downturn have dissipated.

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