Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2023 Orlando: Day 2 Highlights

“Sustainability is a mission-critical priority. Gartner research found that 80% of boards anticipate an increase in their sustainability initiative investments in the next two years.”

“D&A can make a difference across three major dimensions of sustainability – environmental, social and governance.”

“In the environmental realm, AI can be utilized in farming to analyze aerial and satellite images, weather and vegetation, and soil data can be combined with simulation and reinforcement techniques to analyze wildfire risk, prevention, spreading and mitigation.”

“From a social standpoint, AI can support workplace safety, diversity and financial equity.” 

“In governance, AI can be used for compliance and regulation alignment. AI techniques are being leveraged to monitor specific regulation changes in local and federal laws for organizations to stay compliant and quickly adjust their practices.”

“While D&A and AI can be used for good, we must also consider the sustainability footprint. AI has a significant carbon footprint due to growing data sets and increasingly complex machine learning models.”

“Combat the challenges of D&A and AI by focusing on energy usage through more efficient hardware, more efficient cooling, residual heat usage and renewable energy options.”

“D&A is not an internal support function. We must operate through the lens of the impact we have on organizational outcomes.”

“Most CDAOs are delivering on immediate-term business goals, but for around half of CDAOs surveyed, delivery against goals for future-term growth and sustainability is lagging.”

“Across the board, only about one-third of respondents are truly effective at providing value to the organization, contributing to agendas of other C-suite colleagues, demonsting value to stakeholders and influencing culture change.”

“The CDAO serves multiple stakeholders across the organization and cannot operate in isolation. They need to align with organizational strategic priorities, collaborate and sell the overall vision and strategy for D&A and get buy-in for their initiatives.”

“A lack of talent is killing D&A organizations. CDAOs must have a talent strategy that doesn’t count on hiring D&A talent ready-made.”

“Resources and budget are available for D&A, if you make the case and tie it to value.”

Learn more in the Gartner press release, “Gartner Survey Reveals Less Than Half of Data and Analytics Teams Effectively Provide Value to the Organization.”

The best practices for financial governance entail:

• Tracking and predicting cloud spending over time to see where it is going.

• Defining policies to determine how to react to a potential or active budget breach.

• Fine tuning by selecting products that support financial governance features. 

“A multi-pronged approach to financial governance, combined with price/performance as a measure of fitness are key elements of success.”

“FinOps applies the traditional DevOps concepts of agility, continuous integration and deployment, and end-user feedback to financial governance, budgeting and cost optimization efforts.” 

“Financial governance should extend into ensuring organizations are getting the benefits and using them to foster growth.” 

“Data and analytics (D&A) organizations are already introducing FinOps to their organizations.” 

“FinOps is both technical and cultural, and requires D&A leaders to connect cost with value.”