A recent post by George Lawton on venturebeat.com highlighted insights by Gartner’s analysts on pressing trends for operationalizing business value (aka value stream/ mission delivery). The key take away is the need to address composability and “distributed everything.” I’ll add a personal “+1” to that assertion given my observations with my clients and federal sponsors.
Growth in composable infrastructure is powered by cloud capabilities. Growth in composability of data and analytics is fueled by a few drivers: the need to harness and make use of the data available th enteprise already has, the need to deal with growing volumes of new data available to the enterprise, and the incorporation of multiple analytics techniques into all facets of software intensive systems.
All compute no longer takes place in the corporate data center; all data no longer resides in the corporate data lake; all AI/ML and software no longer is deployed with a single solution. Data and compute are distributed resulting in a need for business/govt to come to terms with new data access and software architecture patterns, tools, DevSecOps capabilities, xOps/DataOps principles. Gartner analysts call out assembling data using microservices and containerization; I’ll add assembling AI-centric solutions from across the enterprise and enteprise partners demands new technologies like data virtualization with tool and low-code/no-code tooling.
Another insights Gartner analysts call out is the changes in what folks call big data. Improved decision making and awareness is driving big data to become “small and wide”. Not surprisingly, new tools and technology are quite enabling! They are also not the most difficult part of the challenge: policy, privacy, and humans.
Delivering on mission or business value is also a driver for the explosion in composability driving the rapid grown of DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps clubbed under the moniker of xOps. Fast, secure, resilient, and policy enabled insights are no longer afterthoughts but are moving to core business functions along with data literacy, discoverability, and continued democratization.
This article is a quick read and worth a few moments to scan. While you enjoy it, please keep in mind that xOps and DataOps, like Agility and DevSecOps are not single things that you “do”, “acquire” or “buy”. They are achievable if you take time to have a living strategy or approach with someone, perhaps the Chief Data Officer, Corporate Analytics Champion, or even Chief Software Architect leaning-in to identify and remove obstacles and safeguard implementation and adoption efforts of the organization.
Feature Image from https://www.welldocumentednerd.com/2018/04/16/distributed-computing-and-architecture-patterns/