29 minute read
THINK GREEN
from OUTLOOK 2022
by cxoinsightme
ALAA BAWAB, GENERAL MANAGER, LENOVO INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS GROUP (ISG), MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, IDENTIFIES FIVE KEY AREAS WHERE ENTERPRISE DECISION MAKERS SHOULD FOCUS ON TO REDUCE THE CARBON IMPACT OF THEIR DATA CENTRE OPERATIONS.
With the UAE being announced as host of the COP28 talks in 2023, and Saudi Arabia committing to reach net zero by 2060, environmental issues have never been higher on the agenda in the region. For many businesses, sustainability has joined efficiency, flexibility and resilience as their chief priorities.
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In the post-lockdown economy enterprises are embracing the opportunity to integrate sustainability into the fabric of their data centre operations, both as a business win and for the benefit of society, and to define their pathway to zero-emission computing.
5 priority areas for sustainable data center operations
Sustainability isn’t only about taking incremental steps to reduce carbon emissions and resource consumption. It’s a mindset that permeates organisational culture, and as IT organisations, we have a collective responsibility to set the benchmarks and operate in a way that creates a positive impact on workforces, society, and the environment.
Enterprise decision makers need to balance the growing demand for IT with rising expectations around environmentally responsible operations. Here are five areas of focus that can help align data centre operations with sustainability goals.
1Reduce the resource impact of data Data is growing at an exponential rate. While the potential utility of data makes it a powerful asset, a lack of strategy around its accumulation can quickly turn it into a liability. Currently, around 1% of global electricity is used to power data centres and as we progress towards a world where data is projected to grow to 463 exabytes of data created every day by 2025, electricity consumption could multiply rapidly. The energy impact goes beyond just the electrical. According to a US Government report, a data centre will need on average around 1.8litres of water for every kWh consumed, predominantly for air conditioning purposes.
As part of reducing resource consumption, enterprises should consider moving the infrastructure that underpins their data operations, towards infrastructure built with energy efficiency in mind.
For example, we recommend Liquid Cooling Technology for larger data centers to reduce energy consumption by up to 40%, whilst maintaining uncompromised performance. More energy efficient servers benchmarked by SPECPower, and software platforms like Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) that manage power consumption, can also make a difference.
2Create a circular product lifecycle The circular economy is the name given to reducing the use of materials and energy in manufacturing products and recovering as much of the end products as possible through reuse and recycling. In the data centre industry, many thousands of servers and other hardware are deemed to be ‘end of life’ each year. To reduce the risk of environmentally damaging waste, the industry needs to set a high bar in terms of recycling, reusing or repairing 100% of equipment stopping it from ending up as landfill.
At Lenovo, we practice a ‘DesignUse-Return’ model to cover everything from products and packaging, manufacturing and operations and product take-back and value recovery. This includes services such as Lenovo ARS, which ensures responsible asset recovery and data disposal. We also use recycled materials and eliminate plastic, and are using sustainable materials such as sugar cane and bamboo, for packaging, to create a circular product lifestyle. This approach has led us to eliminate over 3,100 tons of plastic packaging waste since 2008.
3Set aggressive targets Becoming a sustainable business requires accountability. This can be done by committing to stakeholders to meet high standards and industryrecognised sustainability standards. Once you set your targets, there’s no backing away. We discovered the success of this approach more than a decade ago, setting the 2020 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% - a target we surpassed through a 92% reduction. We’ve now set our sights on a further 50% reduction by 2030. We have also signed up for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the first ever science-based Net-Zero Standard for emissions reduction which will combat the current inconsistencies that surround net-zero targets and enable consistent measurement and evaluation of a company’s emissions reduction.
4Put measurement in place to track progress It’s vital for today’s enterprises to get data centre measurements under control. The range of metrics that can be tracked, such as water usage, electricity consumption and use of renewable energy, offer wide avenues for energy savings. Understanding how you’re measuring environmental efforts and what metrics you need to see moving in the right direction will help to show whether you are really making progress.
At Lenovo we issue an annual report for ESG (Environmental, Societal and Governance) that ensures we are tracking our goals, meeting our climate-change mitigation targets and generally measuring what matters most for the business and for society as a whole.
5Optimise your supply chain Data centres, like any complex structure, are reliant on robust supply chains to replace any failed hardware. Unanticipated downtime can result in wasted energy, so companies need to consider their supply chains to cut costs, strengthen business and mitigate environmental risks.
This includes incorporating transport methods and reducing the distance that products travel along a supply chain. By distributing production to more local facilities, such as we have done with our new factory near Budapest in Hungary, companies can cut the number of steps and dependencies required to get the product from factory to customer and lower the fuel consumption required as a result.
Taking responsibility
We try to embrace a sustainabilityfirst approach across Lenovo’s global operations. Our ethos of Smarter technology for All innately incorporates greener technology for all. Our endeavour is to build a better future where smarter technology continues to empower everyone, and that aim cannot be realised without making a positive impact on society and our planet.
We recognise our responsibility to the environment and encourage and support all our customers, partners and stakeholders we work with to do the same. In taking a holistic view of sustainability, we recognise that there’s not one area or strategy that’s going to deliver the wide-ranging reduction in carbon emissions we seek. It’s also a constant process for improvement – it covers everything we do and is important for our business and everyone we work with.
Alaa Bawab
du
For the Middle East, 2022 will see several top trends that transform the technology landscape even further. First and foremost, demands for today’s emerging technologies will continue increasing exponentially, driven by customers
KARIM BENKIRANE Chief Commercial Officer, du and businesses across all industries. Given the effectiveness of both full-time remote working and hybrid workplace environments, demands for technologies including 5G, AI, ML, IoT, and advanced data analytics will continue rising.
At the same time, the telecommunications sector’s leading role in tech-based transformation will become even more prominent. Demands for telco services and solutions have never been higher than today, and operator’s efforts to broaden their respective scopes of fixed, mobile, broadcasting, and other essential offerings will also accelerate the tech landscape’s ongoing evolutions.
What are some of the challenges Chief Commercial Officers (CCOs) should anticipate in 2022?
This is an excellent question and one that is important to consider for all CCO’s in the region. Although the tech landscape will never have been more vibrant or opportunistic than in 2022, all professionals that hold the position of CCO will have to overcome several key challenges to drive results for business and customers, while setting the company up for an ambitious growth agenda.
We will need to push the boundaries of how physical and digital connect and build a seamless omnichannel experience for customers. We will be required to help take end-user experiences to the next level, with potential options here being to use data to increase personalization and building their partnership ecosystems to bring new projects to life. Other key challenges for CCOs in 2022 will include keeping pace with the latest technology trends and ensure that growth happens sustainably while building a seamless experience for our customers.
We ensure that we make our products — the factory, the IT, and the channels — work in a more agile way so we can have more user stories and deliver more and faster initiatives. This is the foundation for how to keep our business strategy materialized and executed, delivering the outcome that we and our clients deserve.
Ensuring customers continuously have the necessary tools, support, and resources at their disposal for not only navigating the postpandemic landscape, but also succeeding in it, is something du has prided itself on since this transition became apparent. These successful efforts continue today, something made possible and sustainable through several essential customer-centric actions.
Firstly, we continue enhancing our portfolio of telco services and solutions at every available opportunity, introducing new offerings and use cases backed by the latest emerging technologies. Secondly, our 5G network rollout is helping to ensure our customers are availing communication capabilities with speed, latency, and capacity of the best possible standards. Thirdly, we are ensuring all du customers and clients have the support they need whenever required, 24 hours
Freshworks
We see 2022 as the year of the chatbot. Regional businesses are having to re-evaluate the employee experience because now that talent has become a global market – thanks to the success of remote work – employees can be a lot more MANISH MISHRA discerning when selecting an Head, Middle East & Africa, Freshworks employer. Bots augment the employee, taking humdrum tasks off their plate and freeing them up to enjoy a more innovative and rewarding work life.
Also, this year, expect to see the cloud march on, with greater adoption levels in SaaS and PaaS, now that companies have gained confidence in digital services. 2022 will witness companies continuing to deploy AI, cloud-based solutions and IoT infrastructure without owning a single server or proprietary piece of cognitive code. Modern no-code interfaces will become more popular as a lack of programming knowledge will cease to become a barrier to smaller organisations – allowing them to offer world-class customer and employee experiences through cloud technology.
As organisations accelerate their cloud adoption, CIOs will have to carefully navigate compliance, which has the potential to be a challenge. We find some countries are quite open in their regulations, but others are very strict. At Freshworks, we are working very closely with our customers, especially on data residency. New regulations such as UAE’s Data Protection Law and the recently issued Personal Data Protection Law in Saudi Arabia mandate the protection of customer data. CIOs will have to strike the fine balance between utilising data to personalise customer experiences and driving business insight, while ensuring they comply with new laws and regulations.
Pure Storage
There are two key trends worth focusing on:
•Cloud will dominate and cause tension
There’s no denying that the cloud is a tremendous catalyst for innovation, providing businesses with a space to test out different techniques or adopt a new technology early. But it is also a source of friction within organisations as the keen adopters and the cloud realists butt heads. These tensions will increase throughout 2022 as the CIO and CEO struggle with FOMO (fear of missing out) and rush to move everything to the cloud in an attempt not to be left behind. Those with a more balanced view on the cloud will find themselves at odds with the ‘move everything to the cloud’ mentality of the CIO and CEO. Cloud realists, who tend to be those lower down the food chain, risk being labelled nonbelievers and may be marginalised if they do not conform to the cloud enthusiasts’ way of thinking.
• Kubernetes will not fall to the wayside in the face of nocode solutions
Organisations expect the impossible from their data - they want faster insights on bigger datasets for a lower cost. The temptation is to think that no-code cloud based solutions can offer this, with some predicting the demise of Kubernetes in the face of a rising number of these solutions. This underestimates
Kubernetes and container technology. Containers and
Kubernetes are the driving force behind how the industry is reinventing the way we build and run applications, fuelling enterprise IT efficiency and agility; their popularity will only continue to expand in 2022. Supporting this we will continue to see the number of start-ups in the K8s ecosystem grow focussing on capabilities around security and observability.
The biggest challenge for organisations, however, in this age of increased Kubernetes adoption will be the supply of developers with the knowledge and experience to work in this domain.
PATRICK SMITH EMEA Field CTO, Pure Storage
If you’re a CIO and you can’t answer the question: “when are we going to the cloud?”, the likelihood is that you’ll be fired. The scale of adoption of cloud technology has been astronomical over the last few years but will increasingly focus on exploiting benefits of adopting containers in 2022. With IT budgets being reallocated from maintaining systems to pursuing innovation, every CIO has to be armed with a comprehensive success plan for how they will use containers and the cloud together in 2022. But they need to remember that fast adoption isn’t everything, the foundations need to be solid. Plans need to be forward looking and build in flexibility because change in this space is guaranteed; be it cloud provider or K8s distribution or both. Modern applications run on modern data services where K8s is the foundation; enterprises want to win with data and the CIO holds the key to this victory.
Cloud Box Technologies
The trends adopted ever since Covid struck continue to evolve around transformation. Fintech, e- Commerce and education are on the forefront for investments and innovation. The top trends will be led by AI where the coming years will experience the major
RANJITH KAIPPADA Managing Director, changes it will garner. While Cloud Box Technologies IoT and the 5G revolution is growing at a slow pace, it will definitely be on the trending list with the revolution it is expected to bring along. However, we see Cloud adoption as the major trend for 2022, this includes multi-Cloud adoption. And lastly, with the current post Covid needs, organisations are making higher investments in digital transformation as well as cybersecurity and are key areas that are seeing a major growth.
The trending technologies for 2022 are also some of the areas which are posing challenges for CIO’s, with security threats at the top of the list. Yet another area is the skill gap which is currently making it difficult to tackle the many IT changes and initiatives. It is now also getting even more difficult to manage data protection where both compliance and safeguarding company policies and information is crucial.
Not all organizations are equipped to face the IT challenges and onboarding a trusted consultant is very important for them to remain consistent with updating and investing in the right technologies to remain relevant in a competitive scenario. We have begun to provide Consultancy as a service where we help our customers unburden their tasks and guide them into their digital transformation journey. To an extent fill in their resource gaps. We help our customers to walk through a systematic approach to explore, understand, compare, engage, experience and review their requirements and in each process, we extend our technical and consultancy expertise to help them make the right decisions.
Riverbed
Insight into the top technology trends for 2022 can be gleaned from the results of our recent Riverbed | Aternity Hybrid Work Global Survey 2021. In this, UAE’s business decision makers revealed that their top areas of technology investments over the next MENA MIGALLY 12-18 months will be: Regional Vice President, META at Riverbed • Better visibility of network and application performance (61%) • Investing in end-user experience and digital experience monitoring solutions (53%) • Investing in cybersecurity technology and software (47%) • Investing in application or network acceleration solutions (46%) • Updating company-wide hybrid workplace strategies and policies (44%) • Increasing the use of cloud services and software-as-a-service apps (31%)
It comes as no surprise that visibility and performance is at the top of the abovementioned technology investment priorities list. Through 2021, we witnessed an explosive growth in Cloud and SaaS Adoption and the massive shift to remote work. In fact, the same Riverbed | Aternity survey revealed that 84% of UAE business and IT decision makers believe that at least a quarter of their workforce will remain hybrid post-pandemic; with 38% saying more than half of their workforce will be hybrid.
A consequence of the rapid digitalisation has been that networks are now more distributed and complex. Quick fix IT solutions have also made app performance less reliable, rendered user experience less predictable, and significantly expanded the security threat plane as the network expanded across geographies and further into the cloud. The adage, ‘You cannot manage what you can’t measure,’ holds true and end-to-end visibility will therefore be a top priority for CIOs through 2022.
Owing to increased network complexity and the need to ensure consistent, high-quality digital experiences for customers and employees, visibility has become increasingly important to organisations. Visibility provides insight into where performance and security problems exist, what they are, when they occurred and why. This insight, in turn, informs action.
Recognising this, Riverbed | Aternity has steadily pivoted its business towards visibility, and we are seeing significant momentum in this space. While performance optimisation remains a core strength of the Riverbed | Aternity solution portfolio, today, visibility forms the largest part of our business with us realising a double-digit growth in our visibility business in the most recent quarter.
Uniphore
With a number of rapidly growing economies that are eager to establish themselves on the global stage, the Middle East has a significant stake in the ongoing AI revolution. In the next stage, we will begin to see regional governments
RAVI SARAOGI Co-Founder and President - and businesses integrate APAC at Uniphore industry knowledge and best practices with cutting-edge technologies to build the foundation for AI architecture. Of these emerging technologies, low code/no code is especially important as it allows business users to utilize AI to facilitate effective problem solving, automate tasks, enhance communication across the enterprise amongst others. This will translate into better workflows and synergy across sales and marketing, customer service, operations, finance, HR, and more, ultimately helping businesses drive more cohesive results.
At Uniphore, we have also demonstrated how recent advancements in conversational AI are helping augment customer service agent capabilities, thereby enabling improved empathy and outcomes. The ability to assess how a consumer feels in real-time, through the unfailing observations of an AI engine, is very alluring to business stakeholders and thus emotion AI will be a key focus area for Uniphore in the coming year.
As we advance through 2022 and the post-pandemic business landscape, the customer experience industry will take on greater priority as it continues to become a key differentiator for brand preference. Investments towards fortifying CX infrastructure and implementation of AI, automation, analytics, low code/ no code, and cloud capabilities will be critical in the drive towards digital transformation. Enabling omnichannel communication systems alongside data analytics will be central in CX to analyze responses and drive insightful business decisions.
By equipping our customers with intelligent technologies, Uniphore is enabling businesses to reap multiple benefits from these innovations. Our focus through 2022 is to empower our customers to build enterprise AI architectures that will facilitate better workflows and synergy across the entire digital enterprise.
Safe Security
One of the biggest technology developments last year was that of the UAE government to allow the use of facial recognition AI in public spaces. Continuing this trend, AI will see a huge uptick in adoption, in fact, IBM has estimated that by 2031
SAKET MODI Co-founder & CEO, Safe Security AI may add beyond $300bn to GDP in the Middle East. In addition, with 5G being pushed in a big way, digitallynative businesses are taking up pivotal roles in critical infrastructure sectors - making them more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Both the tech trends will be underlined by the need for a robust cybersecurity strategy. A trend that I am excited about is the adoption of a common cybersecurity framework across the UAE to have a stronger critical infrastructure cybersecurity plan in place for the region.
In an effort to maximise impact with minimum investment, hackers are focusing on supply-chain and third-party-based attacks. Since businesses are increasingly depending on third parties for business functions, and remote work making regular third-party cybersecurity assessments more difficult, ad-hoc, point-in-time, and siloed - organizations will be breached through vulnerabilities in their vendors’ cybersecurity. This will be one of the biggest challenges in 2022.
Often, the largest vendors may not be the riskiest and vice versa. To know the true financial impact of a data breach via a third-party, CIOs should proactively measure, manage, and mitigate the cyber risks of vendors. Rather than depending only on a pre-onboarding statement of trust questionnaire, businesses should measure the cyber risk posture of their vendors in real-time. CIOs should look at automating and revamping their third-party risk management strategy to implement automated outside-in and inside-out assessments of their vendor cyber risk posture to identify and preemptively suggest prioritized insights to their riskiest vendors.
As remote work becomes a norm, and more businesses continue to embrace a cloud presence in a manner that is too fast for them to secure, cybersecurity will have to take a more proactive stance. To date, it has been reactive, point-in-time, and largely product-driven. SAFE Security uses its SaaS-based API-first platform - SAFE (Secure Assessment Framework for Enterprises) - to ensure automated cybersecurity such that it takes away guesswork in cybersecurity. With SAFE’s unified and integrated approach, businesses can know the cyber risk posture at the micro (asset) level and at the macro (enterprisewide) level to understand what’s going right and where things can improve across people, processes, technology, and cybersecurity products for both first and third-party.
ServiceNow
There are two key trends I believe regional organisations need to consider:
1. More Low-code
In July, the UAE government launched the National Program for Coders — a plan to train 100,000 software professionals, some of whom
MARK ACKERMAN area VP, Middle East & Africa, will go on to create 1,000 ServiceNow digital businesses. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other giants are involved, and annual investment in tech start-ups is expected to rise from US$ 400 million to more than US$ 1 billion.
Initiatives like this have captured the region’s imagination. As ambitious as the idea may sound, it is achievable through the citizen developer. These non-technical domain experts build digital solutions using low-code development platforms (LCDP). A wide range of digital workflows are open to them, and they can plug skills gaps with a lot less training than software developers get. Their business knowledge means they can identify more problems, and LCDPs allow them to — under appropriate governance frameworks — deploy value-adding solutions very quickly. Meanwhile, technical staff can engage in innovation of their own, creating an environment significantly more agile than the one it replaces.
2. Shift from automation to hyper-automation
In 2020, a McKinsey survey of organisations across the globe found 31% of them had fully automated at least one business process, and another 35% had pilot schemes in place. But while automation has a proven track-record of streamlining workflows, the 2022 stakeholder should demand next-level visibility into processes.
Hyper-automation brings together base RPA with business intelligence and integration to create a digital transformation workflow that is laser-focused on optimisation. The methodology requires stepping back from one’s automation instincts to examine the larger corporate picture and how each workflow incorporates people, processes, and systems. It calls for intelligence to be applied to identify processes for automation.
Red Hat
When projecting the Middle East tech landscape’s journey in 2022, several key trends will certainly have a transformative impact. One of the most prominent concerns increasing demands for today’s emerging technologies, which
ADRIAN PICKERING will collectively contribute Regional General Manager, MENA, Red Hat to accelerated tech-based transformation in businesses, industries, and wider society. This includes open source technology, as well as 5G, AI, ML, IoT, advanced robotics, big data analytics, and much more. As for why these technologies will be so transformative, we know for certain that they will empower enterprises, sectors, and government entities alike, accelerating their digital migration plans while equipping all with the newfound capabilities they seek in terms of speed, agility, efficiency, sustainability, scalability, performance.
Given the scale of unprecedented transformation unfolding before us, every C-level executive has an important role to play within their respective company, CIOs included. And besides contributing to the aspirations of their employers and their clients, they must also overcome challenges specific to the position of CIO. While there are several challenges to note, perhaps the most important is utilising the data, information, knowledge, and innovative mindsets at their disposal to help improve experiences for clients, customers, and the business itself. Never before has there been a stronger onus to deliver on personalisation and customisation requirements than today, and these are two areas where efforts can be directed to improve experiences for all. Furthermore, there are other key challenges that will multiply without the necessary attention. These include keeping pace with the latest data, security, and related governance standards and contributing to new use case development and introduction projects.
At Red Hat, we have been helping our customers meet their digital migration aspirations for years. And considering this same form of transformation is key to navigating and succeeding in the postpandemic business landscape, we are perfectly positioned to the deliver on this enduring commitment. The technologies previously discussed are all contributing factors behind the vast benefits of open source and, with navigating the digital-first, post-pandemic landscape becoming increasingly prevalent, we are supporting communities of customers through the provision of the latest industry-leading open source solutions.
Schneider Electric
There is an acceleration to the cloud and we are seeing companies that were reluctant to try remote services now embracing these types of ideas. There is a growing trend of IT and OT convergence as connected devices become more prominent within buildings AHMED FATEEN and non-IT environments.
Vice President of Power Systems Facility managers, systems – Gulf Cluster, Schneider Electric integrators, and others on the manufacturing floor need a seamless exchange between these fundamental networks to ensure productivity and resiliency are maintained. In addition, cybersecurity is by far the number one concern for adoption of IIoT/Digital transformation according to a Morgan Stanley survey. Cybersecurity must be addressed before implementing digital transformation initiatives.
Environmental, health and safety will be a top priority for organizations across the board in 2022. Safety and environmental compliance regulations are being stepped up in many jurisdictions, and sustainability will be a key priority for many businesses in 2022. We have finally begun to understand that our choices have an impact on the overall health of the environment. Similarly, industry owners are stepping up and shouldering the responsibility they have towards ensuring the well-being of society. With the COVID-19 pandemic, firms have focused their attention on employee health and wellness. Remote working and operations have become a norm and a solution. For example, digitalization offers tremendous opportunities for energy companies and utilities to improve safety and sustainability throughout the entire lifecycle of the plant.
Schneider Electric knows the importance of maintaining strong relationships with customers and partners. When a crisis strikes, customers rely more heavily on providers just as companies rely more heavily on their partners. Our major focus areas as a business are digital transformation and sustainability, and demand for these areas is growing in the post-pandemic business landscape. We are designing our products and processes to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and innovate and working with our suppliers to develop cleaner, more efficient manufacturing, packaging, and transport. As energy evolves, our clients are seeking help to set goals, develop strategies, and reach their targets across these domains through active energy management.
Dataiku
The region’s relationship with artificial intelligence is a long one. Ever the early adopters, GCC organisations — from telcos to utilities, retailers to hospitals — have used AI to connect, serve, engage, and heal. But as SID BHATIA we approach the end of
Regional vice president, Middle another challenging year, East & Turkey, Dataiku we are expected to know the contents of the next chapter. Against that backdrop, I see three key tech trends worth paying attention to: AI as standard Over the years, the region’s technology experts have chatted about it at conferences, and blogged about it everywhere else. “AI is now a proven technology,” they would posit. “It is here to stay”, “It is the future”, “Next year is the year of AI”. As familiar as many of these claims may be, even more familiar is the relatively little market traction smart technologies have made when compared with the predictions.
But now we are seeing something a lot more tangible. Even before the pandemic, impartial observers such as third-party analyst firms were predicting surges in AI adoption. PwC, for example, predicted that AI would have a US$320 billion impact on combined Middle East GDP by 2030. Growth like this was never likely to be confined to large enterprise activity. Instead, smaller businesses moving to the cloud would dip their toes in the AI fountain. Once they found that business intelligence, machine learning, IoT, big data, and other AI-fed technologies were viable, useful, and affordable, they would consume more. Surge in low code and no code The empowerment of business specialists with out-of-thebox solutions-building capabilities is a trend that is gathering steam, and quantifiably so. One estimate predicts CAGR of 27.9% between now and 2026 for the worldwide low-code development platform (LCDP) market. Offerings are showing significant evolution to cater to a range of workflows and AI is becoming more and more common among low-code orchestrations.
Meanwhile, data scientists and more technical coders can apply their talents to more challenging problems, which means that we will likely see roles within organisations expand and change to accommodate LCDP adoption. Following this will be intense bursts of innovation from both business specialists and technologists as they settle into new roles that are more challenging and inspiring. More data science Following on from the predicted low-code empowerment that will stretch the talents of both technology and domain specialists, we will begin to see data science unleashed as never before. Data science has suffered the same predictiondisappointment cycle as AI, but there are now strong indicators that experimentation is yielding results, and results are building confidence.
As organisations build their AI cultures and become more efficient in their governance, more data science projects are being launched. As this happens, we can expect governance to play an important role in risk-based assessment of new use cases, especially if they fall outside the comfort areas of existing projects. If a stakeholder were advocating for a project where the required data was missing or incomplete, this could indicate a high probability of failure and would therefore need to be tightly managed. Understanding one’s own processes and modelling them accurately will be key to the success of these next-step ventures. But the potential value of successful outcomes will be too great to ignore, so expect to see a lot more experimentation in 2022.
Today, several large enterprises are handling increasingly more data, which will require more complex algorithms. More complex algorithms are able to learn hidden patterns from the data, by themselves, which is why they are useful — they can deal with problems that a human brain could not understand. And that’s where Enterprise AI brings an edge. Enterprise AI is the ability to embed AI methodology into the very core of the organisation and into the data governance strategy. This means augmenting the work of people across all teams and disciplines with AI for more innovative operations, processes, products, and more. The following are the challenges for teams that don’t have a collaborative data science platform: • Access to systems: Whether accessing the various data sources or the computational capabilities, doing so in a remote setting can be challenging. • Collaboration within teams: Without the physical in-office proximity, individuals can become siloed in the execution of their data projects. • Collaboration across teams: Data projects require buy-in and validation from business teams and also require data engineering and other teams to help with operationalisation. • Reuse over time: Capitalising on past projects is key to maintaining productivity and reducing duplicate work. The lack of in-person discussions can limit this ability.
More and more organisations see the need to provide a centralised, controlled, and elastic environment to support the exponential growth in the amount of data, the number of AI projects, and the number of people contributing to such projects.
