Trends, steps, solutions – with the constant noise around big data and advanced analytics you’ve surely developed effective strategies that are realising huge business value by now.

No? Well honestly, you’re not alone. Many organisations are struggling to navigate the way and failing to truly innovate.

In fact, PwC’s Global Data and Analytics Survey 2016 have the figure at 55% of organisations globally still primarily using analytics to ‘look back’ and understand what has happened and why. The majority are looking back rather than making future decisions based upon data.

Despite this inertia the glare of ‘the future’ still shines bright and captures much attention.

At our recent Chief Data and Analytics Officer Sydney event, we wanted to raise our gaze too and ask the question: What’s the next big thing for data and analytics in Australia and how is it going to impact your organisation?

When we asked a few leading minds of the data and analytics community, some clear themes and emerging trends were revealed. Here are the top ideas discussed as likely focus points for data and analytics in the future:

1. Optimisation & Block Chain Technology

The first key topic to be raised is optimisation. Matt Kuperholz, Chief Data Scientist at PwC, a recognised change agent, shared his views that “optimisation is going to be a massively growing field, and the deployment of this automatically into processes.” This sounds absolutely on-point. Mr Kuperholz ventured that with the key areas of prescriptive analytics and the field of optimisation, it’s “not just what is going to happen but what should I do about it?”. Currently, he believes that it’s “often being done by men and women using whiteboard or their best judgement.” It makes perfect sense then that this will see a significant transformation as complex processes demand investment to bring about return.

Another area Mr Kuperholz shared was block-chain technology. There’s been a great deal of talk around block-chain but what will be the impact? Seemingly “the ability for it to form a decentralised ledger which brings trust, and verification to digital transactions.” In the age of digital, trust is a critical factor. Block-chain then should be explored further, especially when Mr Kuperholz describes it to us as “the most exciting thing to happen to the internet since the internet.”

2. Collaboration

Hopefully, we are now moving away from the days of data silos, and towards ensuring active collaboration between departments. Mark Hunter, Chief Data Officer at Sainsbury’s Bank indicated that “the next big thing is how we mainline data and analytics. In the past, it happened within pockets of the organisation and the big challenge is how we make it an intrinsic part of the entire organisation.”

By collaborating across departments, individuals are now more aligned and focussed on their common business objective. But how do we go about this? Organisations will need to promote and enhance collaboration. Mr. Hunter raises this concern to all businesses that “hopefully, executives and boards are thinking about how we facilitate that active collaboration”. We need to remind ourselves that “Data is not a vertical, it is a horizontal, so something we should all leverage, all benefit from, and to be successful it will come down to people.” It’s a call to action!

3. Extracting value out of data

For Josh Coulson, Senior Insights Manager, APAC at LinkedIn, the next evolution is how we “connect data and analytics to business value and align this to business strategy”. With a move away from the technical hurdles that have been a focus for the last 10-20 years, we need to look to “how we extract value out of data”.

With so much data to sift through, are organisations using this to drive business value? Mr. Coulson, thinks that “the organisations that are really winning in the analytics space is where analytics is really embedded in the businesses. They are starting to see the rise of data democratisation and data driven cultures.”

One example of how LinkedIn are using this approach is where Mr. Coulson has been working with LinkedIn’s sales operations team, which traditionally sets sales goals and manages those sales goals. “By taking a much more data driven approach to that, whether or not that’s in quota setting, rep development or sales enablement, being much more data driven right across the sales organisation is just one way LinkedIn is really powering ahead in reaching business goals with analytics.”

4. Machine Learning and AI

When thinking about the future, Gaj Premnath, Chief Data Officer at Genworth, brings to mind the financial services industry as a whole. He expressed that the move towards advanced analytics and the utilisation of machine learning and true AI was the way forward for data and analytics in the industry.
So how does this improve businesses outlook and analysis?  Mr. Premnath states that adoption of “those processes allow for better insight across the business, not only for the benefit of more efficient processing of day-to-day BAU functions, but for the purposes of proactive risk management.”

5. Collaboration of Human and the Machine

With Machine Learning and AI already a hot topic within the financial services industry, Amy Shi-Nash, the Head of Data Science at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, goes one step further to convey the combination of human interpretation and data from machine learning  making the decision, will be the next big thing.

The algorithms for machine learning are advancing at a furious pace, with the benefit being that many results are better and quicker than what a human can produce, though these results may not always be the right answer. Dr. Shi-Nash explains that “most of the machines are not creative, they are not good at hypothesis, and they couldn’t make sense easily in an ambiguous situation. This is what humans are really good at.”

Importantly, this will impact organisations and how they use this data to converse with the customer on a day-to-day basis.  So how do we go about this? Dr. Shi-Nash states: “If we can find a way to enable these two to work together in approaching learning, in intervention, in planning, I think it really will make a big difference. The learning approach has to be different, people’s mind set need to be different, to make businesses recognise and work together.”

So many exciting developments. But with our existing struggles and challenges to realise value, should we, albeit temporarily, focus on the Now? Maybe with just one eye on the future?

“We can talk about big data and unstructured data analytics, but I really think the relatively small data has not gotten anywhere near its full potential. We don’t need to look to the future, we can work harder with what we've got now!” - Matt Kuperholz, Chief Data Scientist at PwC.

With every organisation having different business objectives depending on where they are at in the data analytics journey, there is no clear cut answer to what the future holds. Let’s remind ourselves to work on the status quo, so we can better our outlook into the future, and embrace the exciting emerging trends on the horizon.

Join us at this year's key events: Chief Data and Analytics Officer Public Sector (2-3 May, Canberra) and Chief Data and Analytics Officer Melbourne (4-6 Sept).

By Kye Ling Gan:

Kye Ling Gan is the APAC Marketing Manager for Corinium Global Intelligence.  Contact Kye Ling at kyeling.gan@coriniumintelligence.com

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