There exists a viewpoint that big data has achieved maturity. From my perspective, there is still room to grow.
Traditional data management and data integration approaches continue to undergo changes that are disrupting and altering product offerings, or resulting in entirely new product offerings. Big data oriented analytic use cases are evolving rapidly, which will continue for the next 3 to 4 years. Organizations must revisit their data strategy and data architectures in order to prepare for the future.
Although the big data community continues to build knowledge through proven use cases, there remains room for growth and maturity. Often, big data oriented projects are approached in silos, or handled by a dedicated, autonomous team in the organization. This is beneficial in the near-term for proving out business use cases rapidly.
However, organizations eventually need to introduce synergy between existing data management teams and big data project teams once the big data projects transition from innovation and unpredictability to stability and predictability. This synergy is also essential for environments and products to ensure cost effectiveness. Best practices that have emerged from traditional data management projects should be infused into big data projects where they can evolve with the goal of establishing common standards across all data management initiatives.
This year (2016) brings a great deal of hope for innovation through big data projects as evidenced by the following signs:
- Proven big data use cases and associated business benefits that will inspire organizations within the same industry to pursue those use cases.
- Proven blueprints and reference architectures for big data industry oriented solutions that will serve as guidelines.
- Increase in focus on big data security and governance.
- Growing familiarity with big data environments, tools and skillsets
- Organizations establishing Analytics Centers of Excellence to guide big data implementations
- Realization by organizations of the importance of big data preparation and curation.
- Data Strategies expanding to include big data use cases.
- Unprecedented evangelism from the community for big data and its benefits
All the best in 2016!