I want to thank all my readers for their support and comments this year. It has been a great year speaking at many of the user group meetings and, as always, a pleasure and honor working/hearing from all of you throughout the year. I believe information technology is going through another transformation which will especially challenge data management from many different dimensions.
Data management transformation turned out to be very interesting in 2015 with some or most of my predictions from last year and the year before coming true. Make your own judgment by checking out my predictions for 2014 here and from 2015 here. Below are the five Data Management Trends that I believe will occur in 2016. Please let me know what you think through the comments or an email.
- “Big Data Analytics” becomes just analytics
Everyone describing their project as big data is over and done. Large volumes of data will continue as the Internet of Things (IoT) from household items such as thermostats, lights, and other devices add more data. Also as personal trackers such as watches, FitBits, and other devices track our habits for health, sleep and nutrition. All this data will prompt new analytic insights into the human conditions.
The large volume of data is now common place and the focus will turn to the valuable analytic effects, new actionable habits for outcomes that improve many aspects of our lives. All these analytical insights will drive more diverse measurement areas to be discovered, monetized, and to provide personal or competitive advantage.
As analytics continue to measure new personal aspects, companies will further dissect every customer interaction within their marketing, products, and competitors so the corporations can optimize it all for the best possible bottom-line outcome. - More and deeper information captured for personal and corporate use
As more Internet of Things get hooked on to our bodies, cars, houses, and everyday products, corporations and governments will track everything. Currently, the political parties and credit agencies track over 400+ different attributes on people according to some reports. All the new data from all the Internet of Things will only add to the data mining to understand your voting preferences and credit worthiness.
Just as the first data warehouses brought us the correlations between a husband picking up diapers for their child on the way home and also purchasing a six-pack of beer, new correlations from all our Internet of Things devices will provide new insights into personal activities, products, and correlations between different aspects of our lives.
All this data will bring out more intense discussions about the data’s context, timeliness, and value. These data value proposition conversations will also lead to more discussions of archiving, summarizing, and deleting data assets. As data knowledge brings power, these new data sources will be leveraged in every way imaginable and, in some cases, used entirely for different and sometimes inaccurate situations. - AI computing will advance
With IBM Watson, Google, and Facebook making advances with AI, and Facebook releasing their open source machine learning system detailed here, AI takes another step forward toward reality.
Also the improvements in Machine Learning and Apache’s acceptance of IBM’s SystemML detailed here, further the efforts of machine learning toward a controversial future.
As potentially computers get smarter, AI becomes more controversial. What will they do with humans as their computing power and knowledge gets more advanced than the human brain or human race? Are we looking at a future as depicted by Hollywood’s Terminator, Transcendence, or El Machina movies, or something else? - Proactive security
With all the hacking and security difficulties, loose UNIX administration, and continued cost escalation of hacking consequences, corporations will start executing proactive security architectures, programs, and preemptive processes. Corporate reputation risks, loss of business, and customer impacts will drive companies to actively disable, deny, and develop security architectures and processes. These new security features will document, allow processes within time windows, and disable or purge unused processes from application software and open source packages.
Identity management and double authentication processes will drive customer loyalty as more people move their business to companies that actively demonstrate security protocols. Customers, partners, and service providers who protect and actively demonstrate the stringent security procedures will win customer business and the competitive marketplace. - Cloud and database as a service continues to grow
As businesses continue to be frustrated with the speed, quality, and features from application development projects and limited application packages, business savvy will push them to go to cloud providers to leverage any solution that supports their business efforts that they can deploy themselves.
Cloud providers will continue to be first deployment choice because of speed and elastic costs. The systems will continue to grow until security is compromised or more major data losses as I detailed a few weeks ago here occur. Even though some early adopters are having some success, if your corporation doesn’t have a cloud implementation, the CIO will be forced into one by the CEO in 2016 so they can all brag about their “cutting edge” during their next country club golf game.
Data management continues to be marginalized as “Load and Go” systems with DB2, Oracle, Hadoop, and Spark at their core are implemented with little or no formal data management review. JSON and other database application interfaces provide object mapping for building quick silos and databases as a service to expand within the corporate landscape. Only when the database as service becomes too complex will corporate management realize their data assets aren’t able to be leveraged quickly and strategically for complete and complex analytics. Then after ignoring data management the business will then come to data management to remedy the performance, scalability, and disaster recovery issues.
These are only five data management trends in 2016 that I believe might come true. Let me know what you think of these predictions or add your predictions to the comments or email me for a lively discussion.
Thank you all again for a great last year, 2015. I really appreciate your support.
Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and have a great 2016!
Dave Beulke is a system strategist, application architect, and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs.
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