Editor’s Note: This piece by John Joseph, president and co-found of DataGravity, is part of SiliconANGLE’s ongoing Predictions series. For more forecasts, check out SiliconANGLE editor Suzanne Kattau’s 12-day line up of Big Data predictions for 2014 (published at the end of 2013), and stay tuned for more prediction coverage as we embark upon this new year!

2014 will see more companies of every size using big data to improve business practices and results. In order to fulfill that prophecy, business leaders will need to target their analytics projects toward answering specific business questions with the most appropriate information. In many cases, that information lies in unstructured data. It is clear that many organizations still don’t understand how to manage this unstructured data or extract intelligence and business value from it, which sets the stage for the following eight key trends in the new year.

1. Big data goes unstructured

In the coming year, the market will realize that unstructured data – email, documents, presentations, videos, blogs, social media, photos and other variable data sources – holds some of the most valuable information in an organization. However, finding the signal in the noise is often difficult, so businesses need to be able to track and extract metadata to enable more sophisticated analysis. As big data analysis moves beyond structured and semi-structured log files, more businesses will be able to answer more critical questions.

2. Insights for everyone

Until now, large enterprises have had far more access to analytic insights, thanks to their ability to hire in-demand, high-priced data scientists. In 2014, that analytical power will extend to organizations that can’t (and don’t necessarily need to) bring data scientists on staff. In the coming year, we’ll see the pendulum swing from the data scientist to the business analyst, thanks to better data management and simplified technology.

3. Data silos come down

Information silos are so 1999. For years, companies have battled against these archaic walls between data, and in 2014, those walls will fall. This is essential, as answering nearly any meaningful question in a modern business requires information from multiple sources. Questions like: What and where is the most relevant content on a given topic? Who is the best person at the company to address this issue immediately? Has this customer had a product issue, and is it wise to try to sell him something else now? In addition, there will be a growing recognition that every time a user copies data from its native location onto Hadoop or other big data infrastructure, he is creating yet another silo that must be managed and integrated.

4. The social organization fuels internal collaboration

Businesses know how to watch social media and use it to interact with customers. In the next 12 months, more of them will realize that internal efficiency and collaboration can benefit from many of the same technologies, tools and techniques. They’ll look for friction-less internal collaboration tools, and they’ll task IT with delivering this enabling technology. Proper deployment and integration can reduce the aforementioned data silos.

5. New data specialties are born

As powerful visualization tools come on the market, users will be better equipped to perform their own analysis, reducing or avoiding dependencies on data scientists.  However, it’s possible that we’ll see some initial setbacks among line-of-business users who draw incorrect or incomplete conclusions, because they don’t have deep understandings of the source of the data they’re visualizing. However, by year’s end, users will be excited about these capabilities, despite those challenges. We might see specialties emerge such as data archaeologist or data architect to guide business users in this area.

6. Mobile access and analytics converge

No 2014 predictions list would be complete without a mention of how the rise of mobile access will continue to affect business processes and possibilities. Most of the above trends, including unified information access, visualization and social organizations, connect to the proliferation of mobile accessibility. We’ll see most of the focus in 2014 on Web technologies like HTML5, rather than building custom applications for each mobile platform and screen size.

7. Calls for data governance grow insistent

IT departments will become frustrated with the fact that they can’t answer simple questions, such as, “How much data do we have stored in Dropbox?” or “What’s our DR plan if Salesforce loses our data?” Owning the data will be more important than ever, and governance will become a bigger topic. Companies will begin thinking twice about what data they allow to go to the cloud and what data they keep onsite. Enterprise-ready management and governance features will become new requirements for cloud-based applications.

8. There will be a separation between the signal and the noise

Telling companies to store everything is unrealistic. When they do that, they’re adding complexity and cost without adding value. In the coming year, it will be essential for organizations to understand the full set of data they produce, as well as the types of analytics they could perform. To separate the signal from the noise, businesses will need to spend more time defining their business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), and organizing their big data analytics programs around them.

Big data is going to improve business in 2014. With more user-friendly ways to ask more pertinent questions of unstructured data, industries will be able to reorder themselves based on information and analytics, and new business models will emerge. Chief marketing officers and chief information officers alike will be able to rewrite their playbooks based on big data analytics. The CMO will be able to respond more efficiently to, for example, what the company’s constituencies are saying on social media, and the CIO will get the chance to bring new value to the organization by delivering analytics as a service.

About the author
John Joseph is the president and co-founder of DataGravity. Previously, he was vice president of storage solutions – marketing at Dell for three years after the acquisition of EqualLogic in 2008. In 2003, he joined EqualLogic as vice president of marketing and product management to launch the company and the PS Series products into the rapidly growing iSCSI SAN market, ultimately achieving the number one market share position with Dell.

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