ISG Provider Lens™ Analytics Platforms - Data Governance Platforms - U.S. 2022
Analytics enhances data trust and business decisions
In 2022, enterprises in the U.S. invested significantly in analytics solutions to empower their business leaders and employees to make decisions using a data-driven approach. The market witnessed a notable change in the mindset of enterprise executives, reflected in the changing pattern of their investments that shifted from capturing and storing data to actively deriving value out of data. A burgeoning competitive environment and new-age startups with disruptive business models necessitated investments in analytics solutions that drive real-time insights and enable decision-making that is essentially data-driven. While the changing market dynamics demand a variety of analytics solutions and platforms, ISG’s analysis reveals that most of the U.S. enterprises are still in their early stages of analytics and data maturity, which warrants the adoption of tools and platforms that help in delivering visualized insights, data-led storytelling and eventually decision-making.
The market dynamics also reflect ISG’s views of the phenomenal growth of analytics tools and platforms, with enterprises actively investing to derive value out of their data. Businesses understand that it is imperative to turn raw data into insights and invaluable to turn those insights into stories. ISG sees a strong upsurge and continuation of the trends from the previous year, where enterprises invested in empowering employees, business users, or decisionmakers to generate insights and help drive business decisions. Considering the expanding volume of data and its sources, ISG expects businesses to leverage the best platforms that enable efficient management of their data, moving beyond global and regional compliance and regulatory practices to focus on data quality. ISG’s analysis also reveals that data management has evolved to become data governance, where the emphasis is placed on data trust to ensure that it is the single source of truth.
Demystifying the data-driven phenomena:
With “data-driven” becoming a keyword and gaining mindshare across enterprises, it becomes imperative to define the boundaries relevant to the strategy and roadmap of becoming data-driven. Presently, enterprises and service providers are buying and delivering analytics products that closely mimic their strategy for data analytics maturity. According to ISG, the definition of data-driven highly depends on whether their strategy is
• Near-term, where the focus is on what data-driven means to enterprises, or
• Long-term, where the focus is on how they plan to become data-driven. ISG views a significant number of both large and small-sized enterprises making significant investments in embedded analytics and business intelligence (BI) platforms and data governance platforms to achieve these strategies.
• Embedded analytics and BI platforms: While firms with lower data maturity seek to enable insights as the first step to become data-driven, enterprises with higher analytics maturity rely on these solutions to achieve data literacy and data democratization enabling citizen data analysts.
• Data governance: Enterprises with lower data maturity focus on efficient data management as well as compliance and security. However, enterprises with higher analytics maturity rely on these solutions to achieve data quality.
ISG views the BI and analytics tools as lowhanging fruit and essential for enterprises. Business that have better maturity in data and analytics are actively exploring options to maximize the value derived from their data by ensuring that the outcome is trusted and secured. These organizations want to invest in tools that ensure data trustworthiness, and that maximize data quality to empower decision-making. As data democratization, data sharing and data monetization become the foundation for the next generation of enterprises, data governance is viewed as the core guiding principle to drive these initiatives. These factors have prompted ISG to study the analytics platform market to analyze embedded analytics and BI platforms and data governance platforms.
Embedded analytics and business intelligence platforms:
The evolution of analytics reporting and BI platforms over the years has been both innovative and inclusive. From a technology perspective, platform vendors have leveraged innovative approaches and thought leadership to ensure that these solutions offer relevant insights, in real-time, that are actionable, interactive, embeddable and drive decision-making. From a user experience perspective, the platforms are highly integrated with augmented self-service capabilities and exceptional user interfaces that allow nontechnical users and executives to take full advantage of the underlying analytics engines to deliver insights and improve data literacy.
The user interface and general design of BI tools are shifting toward data-led storytelling and interactive platforms that allow analysts and users of the reporting tools to become more data-centric with their business decision-making. These initiatives are also targeted at executives and functional line of business managers to drive deeper insights and better understand key performance metrics.
There are an increasing number of modular and complementary solutions to accommodate different data sources, data cleansing and data collation, and to drive better visualization. These modular solutions and accelerators also provide quick insights with pre-built templates that are designed specifically for verticals, business functions and KPIs. While the querying is still in text mode with the typical “what-ifs,” time-series and other traditional relationship-based querying, ISG expects better cognitive capabilities and voice-enabled querying to follow soon. Providers should be wary of the different device form factors where BI platforms are used and need to strategize accordingly.
Data governance platforms:
Data governance platforms are still in the early stages of adoption, with many enterprises actively exploring options to shift from a data management strategy to governance. ISG’s analysis reveals that presently governance is viewed as a platform-centric approach with associated services slowly gaining traction. Some of the key factors influencing the shift include:
• Challenges from a heterogeneous technology environment;
• A focus on metadata for contextual insights with data lineage;
• Investments in cloud migration and modernization;
• Structured yet flexible approaches for data collection and management;
• Data literacy initiatives and data stewardship;
• Adherence to compliance and regulatory policies.
Vendors in the market are focusing on data governance from various perspectives and approaching the market with strategies and messaging that give them a natural progression from their current product functionality to data governance. Data catalogs, master data management, metadata management, data virtualization, security and privacy and access management are some of the areas from where vendors are extending their functionalities and features to address governance capabilities. Vendors are also partnering with service providers to co-innovate unique data-driven frameworks and foundational models that suit specific organizational needs from a scale, industry and functional domain.
ISG’s analysis also looks at market dynamics, which have shifted from viewing data through the technology lens to viewing data through the business impact lens. As enterprises increasingly rely on data-driven decision-making approaches, the sanctity of data, and hence its quality and trustworthiness, has become the key priority warranting investment in data governance solutions.
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