Themes

Data and analytics leaders are faced with unprecedented uncertainty, disruption and opportunity, from internal and external sources. Yet, as disruptive and destructive as the global COVID-19 pandemic has been, it has served as an engine of innovation and proved that even the most conservative organizations (and people) can make radical changes quickly.

Data and analytics has never been more critical. Over the next year, being able to leverage D&A to anticipate changes, shift quickly in response, and then accelerate change to infuse data and analytics everywhere will be an essential capability for success. Fundamental will be learning new skills and competencies, unlearning the obsolete and relearning what works, continuously. Learn, Unlearn, Relearn: Data and Analytics Everywhere.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to introduce new sources of growth, changing how work is done and augmenting the role of people to drive innovation. From a people perspective, the Gartner TalentNeuron™ database shows that there are 2.2 times more jobs for both AI specifically and across all of D&A outside IT. And as AI extends its footprint across the business, the Gartner 2021 CIO Survey shows the number of enterprises implementing AI tripled in the past year, and yet many businesses are struggling to separate AI hype from reality.

In this new reality, D&A leaders must rewire and rethink the core of their organization’s culture around D&A to drive the transformation needed to propel their organizations forward into a successful, AI-augmented future.

Data and analytics leaders are driving digital transformation, creating monetization opportunities, improving the customer experience and reshaping industries. Accelerating digitalization, driven by the dramatic surge in data new technologies, particularly AI, has created unprecedented disruption and ambiguity. We showed data and analytics leaders how to lead with purpose through shared vision and storytelling. How to bring clarity by navigating the ambiguities brought about AI (to augment or automate), the potential tyranny or business value of metrics and the challenges of privacy and personalization. We proposed that the only way for data and analytics leaders to deal with the pervasive ambiguity is to follow this important mantra: Principles lead, rules follow.

We helped data and analytics leaders capitalize on the strategies they developed in 2017 and amplify their influence, becoming a catalyst for transformation all across the enterprise. It was about building on the fundamentals and harnessing emerging practices and technologies to increase the benefits of existing initiatives and also rapidly and broadly generating adoption of modern data and analytics capabilities throughout the business — from centralized functions to distributed teams and even beyond enterprise boundaries, engaging a wide range of roles and personas, and across a diverse set of use cases. It was about making data and analytics leaders the epicenter of business value.

This was aimed at raising awareness among data and analytics leaders and their management about all the new, innovative, abundant and transformational opportunities available for them to capture. The conference helped them to navigate the complex and vast landscape of initiatives they could possibly pursue, and narrow their focus to where they can have the greatest initial impact. We explored the juxtaposition between scarcity and abundance as it relates to data and analytics.