The financial industry is in the midst of a profound digital transformation. Unfortunately, most financial organizations have some catching up to do in this regard. As noted in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Finance Data and Analytics Governance, 2023, “Through 2026, 80% of finance organizations’ advanced analytics investments will fall short of expected ROI because they failed to adapt and modernize their enterprise data governance and management.”
However, as Gartner states, “This Hype Cycle enables FP&A leaders to explore the real risks and opportunities of finance D&A governance technologies. This information helps leaders avoid adopting an innovation too early or too late, avoid giving up on an innovation too soon or avoid hanging on to it for too long.” In this post, I’ll provide an overview of this document.
The Technologies
In this report, Gartner analyzes 26 technologies, tools, or capabilities across the first four Hype Cycle phases, and these technologies include:
Innovation Trigger Phase:
- Connected Governance
- Anomaly and Error Detection
- Data Observability
Peak of Inflated Expectations Phase:
- Data Mesh
- Responsible AI
- Data Fabric for Finance
Trough of Disillusionment Phase:
- Single Version of Truth
- Active Metadata Management
- Augmented Data Management
Slope of Enlightenment Phase:
- Data Lake
- Data Classification
- Semantic Search
Analyzing the Gartner Findings
None of these technologies made it to the Plateau of Productivity phase, but I don’t think this should be understood as a criticism. This is because it takes time for technologies to pass through the Gartner Hype Cycles, and readers can still derive value from the comparative analysis. Here, I’ll take a look at one from each list.
Data Literacy
Data literacy is critical, because no matter which technology is involved, if people do not know how to use their data, the technology will be in vain. However, organizations can take concrete actions to improve data literacy; conversely, a failure to do so will have a direct, negative impact on data literacy.
Gartner makes eight user recommendations for improving data literacy, including “Designate a leader who will be accountable for developing and executing the roadmap,” and “Foster data literacy during data and analytics requirements gathering by bringing data and business experts together around the problem to be solved.”
Data Fabric for Finance
“Data fabric” gets its name from the flexible manner in which it enables organizations to access data. In this report, Gartner defines data fabric for finance as “a design framework that improves data access and speed by offering more flexible, reusable, and automated data integration solutions.” Gartner goes on to say that “Data fabric for finance enables enterprises to leverage and access all data and analytics (D&A), regardless of source, format or structure. It capitalizes on past D&A investments while concurrently providing prioritization, cost control and new D&A management spending guidance. By enhancing human and technology interactions, the fabric ensures greater flexibility, composability, scalability and orchestration of consumable data that spans use cases, sources, models, or other hybrid D&A forms.”
Gartner makes six user recommendations for implementing a data fabric for finance, including, “Invest in an augmented data catalog that assists with creating a flexible data model. Enrich the model through semantics and ontologies for the business to use the catalog.”
Begin Your Digital Transformation with the Gartner report
I hope this short post provided you with a useful overview. For the full, 99-page analysis of all 26 technologies, Gartner subscribers can access the complete report here.
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Finance Data and Analytics Governance, 2023. GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
