Predictions for the Post-Pandemic Era

‘Tis the season to be making predictions regarding the new year, and who better to make predictions and comments on what lies ahead for the analytics field than predictive analytics professionals themselves? Along those lines, following are thoughts from five executives at Alteryx, a leading analytics process automation firm, on what to look for in 2021.

Alan Jacobson, chief data and analytics officer: 

Upskilling will play a bigger role in corporate boardrooms as well as in employees’ lives.

While it is always important for companies to offer training to employees, the fields of data science and digital transformation are challenging companies to break the mold and deliver new and constantly evolving ways to upskill and deliver ROI. More and more, we’re going to see upskilling programs that help people learn and apply skills in real time. Hackathons are one example of how this is currently happening in many companies. We’re going to see an expansion of these and other on-the-job experiences that use real data and real problems with a goal of creating real value. Data science has evolved to the point where people don’t need to go back to college to learn; they’ll learn on the job or while at home by encountering new tools and technologies. And with a huge shortage of those with analytic skills, many will start new jobs and careers based on the new skills.

The “analytic divide” is going to get worse.

Like the much-publicized “digital divide,” we’re also seeing the emergence of an “analytic divide.” Many companies were driven to invest in analytics due to the pandemic, while others have been forced to cut anything they didn’t view as critical to keep the lights on – and a proper investment in analytics for these organizations was on the chopping block. This means that the analytic divide will further widen in 2021, and the trend will continue for many years to come. Without a doubt, winners and losers in every industry will continue to be defined by those that are leveraging analytics and those that are not.

Derek Knudsen, chief technology officer:

The role of CTO will continue to evolve; holistically supporting employees in remote environments will be critical.

The role of a CTO is always evolving, but as we move into 2021, much tighter coordination, cooperation and integration will happen between this role and that of HR and other corporate functions. With remote work, or some hybrid of remote and on-premise work, here to stay for many companies, CTOs will be focused not just on providing remote connectivity, but also on ensuring this enables positive working conditions, as well as supporting the physical and mental wellbeing of employees.

Customized business systems will start to displace off-the-shelf remote working.

Over the coming year, we’ll see increased investment in customizing existing business systems to address the nuances of the new remote business environment. Although it feels natural to optimize your business, it makes those implementations more fragile while simultaneously making upgrades harder and creating significant hurdles when it is time to migrate to a new platform. Those looking to circumvent the stress involved with adopting a new platform must remember that many of today’s enterprise business systems have proven process templates and that it is easier to adjust process, not software.

Data democratization will become the new norm.

It’s the job of the CDO to ensure expansion of growth across the entire business. This can be achieved by providing structured data that people can actually use. A successful CDO should democratize data so that it’s accessible and understandable by people. A good CTO will complement the CDO by creating the necessary tooling to find the required data. This means giving users a set of visualization tools and reporting tools that allow them to get after the data to run insights. As we move into 2021, we’ll continue to see further and tighter collaboration between these two roles, driven by necessity. If you have tools with bad data, you’re exacerbating the data challenge. If you have limited tools, only a small subset can do anything with the data.

Mark Anderson, chief executive officer:

Increased buyer sophistication and demand for greater automation.

If nothing else, the past six months has crystalized the acute need and significant challenges companies face when they have disparate legacy systems in place. This is pushing companies to innovate faster than ever before. Moving forward, we’ll see smarter and more sophisticated infrastructure purchases, with companies demanding fewer vendors, less complexity and much greater automation. This will have a marked impact across industries in 2021.

Self-service and simplicity will win the day.

The pandemic has shown that overly complex and rigid systems are more of a hindrance than a help when you have to quickly pivot. Businesses will move further toward flexible platforms and self-service infrastructure that enables employees and businesses to turn on a dime when needed. And, as businesses continue to be remote or partially remote, employees will need and demand eloquent and accessible self-service capabilities in order to remain highly functioning in these distributed work environments.

Dean Stoecker, co-founder and executive chairman of the board:

New leadership techniques must emerge to manage remote workforces.

The changes that we will see in the year to come offer a clear look at how the nature of work is set to be changed forever. What we do will not change, but where work is conducted will continue to evolve. Despite what some industry leaders are saying about being excited to get back to the office, I don’t anticipate a return to the status quo. Now, the challenge for leaders will be the way we engage the workforce to continue to innovate, collaborate and optimally execute for the benefit of customers. I believe an over-reliance on machines and technology rather than human, face-to-face interaction will lead to a more disconnected workforce that struggles to find its purpose. Tomorrow’s leaders must be prepared to meet these challenges head on and keep employees happy, productive and innovative.

Leaders must empower employees through technology.

Over the coming year, it will become apparent that in order to achieve success in a competitive market, companies have an immediate need to shift focus and embrace a model that provides insights faster and speed up decision-making. To achieve this every worker needs to be incentivized to value all data as an asset that can support the business. Technology must be implemented that allows workers to easily find the data assets relevant to a question, technology that allows them to organize and prepare the disparate data, and finally technology that creates analytic pipelines that can be shared and automated so as to continually inform the business. Mainstream implementation of artificial intelligence technologies can never happen unless we leverage the data and amplify human intelligence first.

Greater focus on data and analytics is here to stay.

COVID-19 forced us to address an enormous amount of challenges and in doing so, drove an intense focus on data and analytics to provide much-needed insight. From genome sequencing to understand the virus and its mutations, to the spatial analytics helping us track its spread, to the prediction of its peak states, to anticipating the needs of healthcare workers to managing the rollout of trillions of dollars of government aid. Because the virus has also served to place a spotlight on other areas where society is failing its most vulnerable, we are now more acutely aware of the need to be more curious about the problems the world faces: homelessness, addiction, healthcare, security, social justice and more. Post pandemic, data science best practices also have the potential to provide efficient and innovative ways to help tackle some of these fundamental real-world problems.

Data-driven transformation will equip innovators for future success.

It’s no secret that 2020 was challenging for businesses as they seek to adopt new models that put them in a position to succeed and continue operations during an unprecedented public health crisis. To succeed in the coming year will require a full retooling of operations in order to unleash the potential of every employee. Organizations that create and enable a data-driven culture, one where any question can be asked of any dataset by any data worker to support most any use case will survive and thrive even if market conditions worsen.

Sharmila Mulligan, chief strategy officer and CMO:

Citizen analysts will increasingly upskill to become data scientists.

The growing complexity of most industries and companies also means that once we see self-reliance in terms of developing IT processes or using analytics, there will quickly be a huge push to expand that skillset further. With the market erratically changing from month to month, there will be a much greater emphasis placed on data science than ever before. This, in turn, will drive more citizen analysts to upskill to become data scientists.

HR analytics will separate the remote workforce winners and losers.

Every business has faced unprecedented challenges over the past year, so how will companies leverage data and analytics to overcome hurdles? One solution that will continue to rapidly gain favor is to combine data and analytics with data science and integrated processes to strengthen operations and insulate businesses from future challenges. This could allow them to analyze workforce health, conduct employee flight risk analysis or analyze and predict safe reopening for offices. In a world where we are all working remotely, we’ll see smart companies implementing the right tools and tech to maintain standards while making the traditionally complicated tasks more accessible by placing a greater emphasis on a single platform.

AI-driven supply chain analytics will learn to see around corners.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the world still depends on robust manufacturing and supply chains. As businesses gear up not just to survive but to thrive in the era of social distancing, predictive analytics will further emerge as a crucial tool for mitigating risks, managing volatility and offsetting risk. During the pandemic we saw forecasting models and processes simply break down. With supply chains more complex and dynamic than ever, moving forward it will be crucial that they be augmented, automated and enhanced through the support of analytics processing that matches their sophistication.