By Alexis Wierenga | March 13, 2024
Executive Insights from Gartner Data and Analytics Summit
With high expectations for data and analytics leaders to deliver value, it’s imperative to use collective intelligence — coordinated action and collaboration between AI and humans to solve problems — to optimize business outcomes. Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Debra Logan and VP Analyst Ehtisham Zaidi outlined how this era of combined human and machine intelligence will create new opportunities for leaders.
“61% of D&A leaders involved in generative AI planning say that educating leadership is one of their primary responsibilities."
Ehtisham Zaidi, VP Analyst at Gartner
Take these actions to lead your team in shaping an AI vision and making data AI-ready:
Embrace organizational flexibility. Rejigger operating models to facilitate autonomy and flexibility.
Extend data literacy to include mastering AI. Leverage heightened interest in AI to secure the training resources needed to level up your workforce with new skills.
Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Rita Sallam looked ahead to how the CDAO is becoming increasingly central to their organization’s successes and failures, what a new risk/reward equation looks like in the context of enterprise AI ambition and how to realize value from investments as your team gets better at addressing the challenges of data democratization.
By 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive ethical governance frameworks.
Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner
For 2024 and beyond, Gartner predicts:
CDAOs must become indispensable.
Potential loss of intellectual property and copyright infringement will be a major risk.
People will prove key to getting value from AI.
Governance will be rebranded as strategic business.
Enterprises must balance AI ambition with risk tolerance.
Natural language will become the new composer.
GenAI will emerge as both the problem and the solution for cost escalation.
Natural language will free data access and use.
Expect new user experiences beyond dashboards.
Governance will continue to be key to AI value.
In the face of financial, technological, organizational and workforce challenges data and analytics face, what comes next? In this session, Gartner VP Analyst Gareth Herschel identified common threads to reveal four trends that address common issues and key actions to take in response.
"Data and analytics is the heart of our organizations, which means we are the single point of failure for almost everything else in our business. If our systems go down, the entire organization goes down."
Gareth Herschel, VP Analyst at Gartner
Take these immediate actions to respond to trends in data and analytics:
Think differently. Embrace complexity and protect innovation time.
Build your financial acumen. Prove your value and use FinOps.
Transition some authority. Govern for empowerment by establishing best practices for the leaders on your team to use with the greater organization.
As their roles become more complex with increasing responsibilities and growing access to data and budgets, CDAOs must rapidly reinvent themselves as drivers of business innovation. While the foundational capabilities of data and analytics strategy, governance and solution delivery are still important, these parts of the job need to be reframed entirely — or CDAOs risk becoming irrelevant, according to Gartner VP Analyst Nate Novosel.
“By 2026, 75% of CDAOs who fail to make organization-wide influence and measurably impact their top priority will be assimilated into technology functions.”
Nate Novosel, VP Analyst at Gartner
To continuously improve in your CDAO role:
Build your relationships, reputation and reach. Secure the mandate and resources to carry out your responsibilities, or reconsider if your position allows you to do what you are being asked to do.
Navigate complexity by consistently showing business value. Point to your successes as evidence for why your expanded responsibilities mandate additional budget and resources.
Chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) play a critical role in driving change that delivers enterprise value. Gartner Senior Director Analyst Sarah James explained the three key steps executive leaders can take, from personal development to storytelling to overcoming common roadblocks.
“Our job is to push the organization to think differently (or to think at all). If we’re not doing that, then we’re not acting as change agents, we’re acting as order takers.”
Sarah James, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner
To effectively lead change:
Establish your change team. Lead by example in sharing your vision and authentically empathizing while building relationships with the executive team and key influencers.
Develop data-driven change stories. Communicate benefits for both the organization and the individual stakeholders by not only pointing to KPIs but also tapping into the why behind them.
To enable innovation across the organization and build adaptable AI strategies that can meet future needs, frameworks for scaling generative AI must be rooted in high-quality enterprise data. In this session, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran discussed the rapidly changing technology landscape while sharing emerging key use cases for deploying AI across enterprise business functions.
“Through 2025, at least 30% of GenAI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value.”
Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner
To lead in deploying generative AI to the wider enterprise:
Pilot use cases for scalability. Set up a sandbox environment for safe experimentation while envisioning future data, privacy, security and usability needs.
Instill robust data engineering practices. GenAI models deliver the most value when combined with high-quality organizational data.
Gartner Data and Analytics Summit equips data and analytics leaders to drive synergies between artificial and human intelligence in order to achieve organizational goals and to scale solutions using data management, data architecture and governance best-practices.
Learn more about Gartner Data and Analytics Summit taking place in Orlando, São Paulo, Mumbai, London, Tokyo and Sydney in 2024.
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Debra Logan is a VP and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research. Ms. Logan covers strategic topics in the Data and Analytics IT Leaders team. She also covers all aspects of the Office of the Chief Data Officer and other new and emerging information focused roles. Ms. Logan does research on change and change management, data driven culture change, leadership development & career coaching.
Ehtisham Zaidi is part of Gartner's Data Management Research team and is currently the Key Initiative Leader for this research agenda. His research is focused on Data Management Solutions for Data and Analytics leaders. His research topics include Data Management Architecture, Data Management Platforms and Ecosystems, Data Engineering, Data Integration, AI-Ready Data, Data Products, Data Fabric and Data Mesh, Data Strategy and guidance on Pricing and Licensing for tools in these topic areas.
Arun Chandrasekaran is a Distinguished Vice President, Analyst at Gartner, within the global CIO practice, where his research focus is on artificial intelligence. Arun spearheads Gartner's research and advisory on Generative AI, including leading popular research notes such as AI Predicts and Hype Cycle for Generative AI. Arun is a trusted advisor to executive and IT leaders, which includes the board of directors, CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and their direct reports. He has advised thousands of CIOs, CTOs, and conducted hundreds of workshops for several Global 2000 organizations on AI, Cloud, and Innovation. In addition, he covers the start-up ecosystem closely, advising venture capitalists and tech CEOs. His views have been featured in media such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, Fortune, Fast Company, Forbes and Computerworld.
Sarah is a Senior Research Director in Gartner's CDAO practice where she focuses on topics at the intersection of data and human behaviour - including CDAO impact and influence, data-driven culture development, bringing people along on the data journey, self development, effective delivery, neurodiversity, and more.
As Vice President, Data & Analytics Research & Advisory for Gartner, Nate Novosel advises D&A leaders at large and midsize enterprises on strategic initiatives such as strategic planning, roadmapping, org design, talent, and D&A value as well as tactical initiatives such as implementing data literacy and data governance initiatives. Mr. Novosel's recent presentation materials have included developing D&A strategies and organizational models as well as helping to foster a data-driven culture. He has been writing research and advising executives for 21 years.
Gareth Herschel is VP analyst at Gartner with too many years of industry experience. At various times he has researched the role of analytics in improving the customer experience as well as how organizations can work with service providers. He is fascinated by the role of analytics and psychology in decision making, and passionate about helping organizations intentionally design the way decisions are improved. His current research focuses on the alignment of data and analytics with organizational culture and decision making.
Rita Sallam is a Distinguished VP analyst and Gartner Fellow in the Data and Analytics team. Mrs. Sallam's focus includes tracking market trends, vendor assessment and selection, and identifying best practices for realizing business value from data, analytics and AI investments. Of particular interest is how leaders can leverage disruptions in AI to create sustainable competitive advantage. She is also focused on building frameworks for selecting and valuing data and analytics portfolios including AI investments, including Generative AI.
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