Gartner Data & Analytics Sydney 2022 – Innovation Evangelism

Last week I was in beautiful Sydney, Australia for the Gartner Data and Analytics Conference. Here’s a quick video summary:

One of the big things that struck me was the changing role of data. For the last 30 years, whenever you want to do analytics, the first step is to rip it out of the operational applications and try and move it to a different environment—so data warehousing, data lakes, data lakehouses and now data clouds.

But the problem with that is that it’s like ripping a tree out of the forest and trying to get it to grow in a different environment. You lose the roots, all of the rich, business, context and metadata and security and hierarchies, and then you have to try and recreate it in the new environment.

It’s possible, but it takes huge amounts of time and effort.

Now, thanks to the cloud, there’s a better way: we can bring the technology to the data rather than the other way around, and we can put business process back at the center of analytics.

Data is useless. You actually have to change something in the way you do business.

So the right approach for the future, I believe, is to leave data as much as possible where it already is in your business applications, and then use technology such as the SAP Business Technology Platform to connect that data, to provide it as a series of services that the business users can use to create their own applications.