About Data Governance, Trends and Interpretations

 The following graphs illustrate the opinions of 270 ICT professionals ranging from CEOs and CIOs to enterprise, solution and data architects, lead programmers, digital transformation managers and BI engineers, data scientists as well as DBAs and meta data managers. You name it, any job title in the survey is present. Of course, this is just a photo taken between February and October 2024: it was hard work reaching out to the relevant interviewee types but here are the results. Your remarks are welcome!

The graph below is music to my governance ears: a large majority supports the duopolistic governance model which is crucial if you want to survive in a volatile market. Although arguments like “efficiency” and “authority “ still support the business and ICT monarchies. Because mutual adjustment is just a waste of time to these government models, that is, in their perception…

If you take a “follow the money” approach, you get confirmation: a majority of IT professionals  considers it a duopolistic issue: 

Half of the respondents consider AI’s introduction as inevitable. Although much of its use is still “autocomplete on steroids” replacing a Google search and money is being burnt faster than ever in any ICT innovation, the first use cases are going to the market. (Stay tuned, we’re also working on one).

Again, a strong majority of ICT Professionals see data and applications move to the Cloud. That is by no means ignoring the privacy issues with data hosted on the major US Cloud providers. But EU based initiatives like Open Telecom Cloud or OVH Cloud in France which has high ticket customers like Auchan, Louis Vuitton, Société Générale are beginning to show up on the radar. We notice multi cloud strategies are emerging to avoid calamities like the Office  365 outage the 25th November this year.

Although most of the interviewees heard about robotic process automation (RPA) the combo “Process and Task Mining” were not that high as expected on the agenda. With an ageing workforce and a demographic collapse in the near future, the EU should invest every penny in automation. 

With tools like Mendix, but also process and task mining tools like Celonis or analytical applications like KNIME Analytics Platform or Dataiku one would think that more ICT professionals would appreciate the advance in productivity of low code tools. In this photo, they’re somewhat sitting on the fence. Is it because developers remain faithful to their tools as they are unwilling to abandon their skill set to acquire  new one?

Amazing: most professionals embrace the Cloud but they’re not prepared to acept the logical consequence of Cloud architectures. Although complex to implement, zero trust is well-suited for remote work, cloud-based networking, and hybrid environments.

I confess, this last question was sort of a lie detector. And judging from the answers, not too many respondents were fabulating. 

Of course, the Low Countries show a disproportionately large number of respondents but still, 63% are outside our home market:

About the survey

Between February and October 2024, we had to invest heavily in contacting the right ICT professionals to get meaningful answers. It took us quite a few mails, phone calls and even visits to obtain these results. Are these results representative ? I am not sure. Are they significant? Maybe. Are they inspiring? Most certainly as we use them in our ICT Literacy course to get the conversation going about business – ICT alignment. Give us your opinion in the comments.  

The survey is still open if you wish to contribute.