I recently attended a conference on financial data and innovation and wanted to highlight & share some key themes and findings I took away from it.
For 2019 Gartner considers data and analytics as a top digital transformation initiative.
Data Governance & Maturity
This has got renewed focus with people making a distinction between defensive data governance – to comply with regulations, privacy and offensive data governance – to responsibly use data for commercial gains.
Terms like Information Ethics ( is it appropriate to collect and use this data), Information Journey ( the path traveled by data) are now commonly used in lexicon this year unlike a few years back.
I feel that some of this is the effect of GDPR and general regulatory direction which have made companies to consider collecting and being responsible for data in a different fashion.
Some very interesting polling results among audience
More and more people have heard a NO when they tried to use the data they hold for a secondary commercial use
Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
It’s interesting that audience polling still shows a good half of the audience consider AI/ML as shiny and buzz words. However the march of adoption of this discipline is on-going as evidenced in multiple sessions.
A recent report from Bank of England 1 also clearly points to this trend.
Knowledge Graph
This is not new technology but it has immense potential to provide data insights and in our data rich environment this can play a critical role. The general feeling is that this has been under-utilised and is a wonderful kit in the tool-box for any data professional.
Cloud Infrastructure
These were some brilliant thinking points that came from a session and this helps plan with your Information security and regulatory obligations in mind as well.
- Understand how you encrypt your data at rest and in motion to and from cloud – any technologies you use in-house on top of default provided by vendors?
- Do you understand where your data actually physically resides – among multiple countries and regions ?
- How tied are you to one cloud provider? If for some reason you need to – can you close down that relationship and have a mirror come up in another cloud provider?
- What does disaster recovery in a traditional sense mean when applied to cloud?
Miscellaneous
There were no use-cases or mention of block-chain technology in relation to whether it can solve some of the data governance or privacy challenges faced today. I was really hoping to hear something on that.
Some Interesting companies i came across in conversations or presentations
REFERENCES/FOOTNOTES
DISCLAIMERS
These are my personal notes and observations and do not reflect any official policy or announcement from any company or employers past and present. These notes are only provided for informational purposes.
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