While companies continue to realize the importance of data science and its ability to positively impact revenue, scaling it across an organization continues to be a challenge. A new survey released today reveals a new leading factor to success — creating a positive, model-driven business culture among employees. This insight is one of the findings from a survey of data and analytics professionals sponsored by Domino Data Lab, provider of the leading open enterprise data science management platform trusted by over 20% of the Fortune 100.

Conducted by DataIQ, the leading membership-based forum for connecting, educating and supporting the data and analytics community, the survey curated a research panel of influential data and analytics professionals across a wide range of industry sectors and company sizes in the UK. Seniority ranged from senior managers and heads of department to global directors and chief officers.

The survey found that one in four businesses¹ expect data science to impact topline revenue by more than 11 percent. However, the survey indicates a challenge with company culture, suggesting a positive, model-driven culture is difficult to build and still needs to be developed. 39 percent want a clearer definition of needs from stakeholders, 38 percent recognize the need to train business users in data science concepts, and 32 percent identify the need for a more positive relationship with stakeholders.

“Many companies begin their data science journey by hiring a few data scientists, but overlook the importance of building a model-driven culture that aligns with business users and their needs,” said Nick Elprin, CEO of Domino Data Lab. “This survey highlights the impact that the lack of positive culture can have on identifying proper use cases, setting appropriate expectations, and ultimately delivering a measurable impact to the business. Understanding these challenges is important for companies at all stages of maturity so they can course correct and successfully scale data science operations across their organizations.”

Additionally, 40 percent of respondents indicate that weak understanding or support for data science in business is one of their biggest challenges. One out of three organizations (34%) indicate that conflict between data science and IT is one of their biggest challenges. Even companies that describe themselves at the “advanced” and “reaching maturity” levels in terms of their adoption of data science and analytics are not free of culture conflict. For both of these groups, half (52 percent and 50 percent of both groups respectively) indicate that conflict between data science and IT is their biggest challenge.

Some other findings from the survey include:

• More than half of all organizations (57 percent) expect a revenue uplift of under five percent, showing that the failure to embrace data science contributes to low expectations.
• One out of five businesses (21 percent) are gaining a major competitive advantage through the use of data and analytics tools across their enterprise.
• Sixty-seven percent have grouped their data scientists together as a central function or department (e.g., a Center of Excellence), rather than federating them across the business.
• One out of three organizations (32 percent) need months to get models into production. This latency must be addressed, because market conditions can change quickly and models trained using outdated data will make suboptimal recommendations.
• One in 10 organizations (10 percent) have adopted a superior automated form of model monitoring that provides proactive alerts when models are starting to decay. Data scientists can then address potential model issues before they impact business results.

“For data science to deliver real value to the organization, a positive culture needs to be created in which business stakeholders and data science practitioners have a close bond and common goals,” said David Reed, Knowledge and Strategy Director at DataIQ. “As the survey results show, that’s easier said than done. Four in ten organizations identify a weak understanding or support for data science by the business as their biggest challenge, which creates a vicious circle that leads to one in eight failing to create compelling use cases.”

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications continue to expand opportunities for humankind’s progress and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. UNESCO is working to harness these opportunities in its fields of competence and has been leading reflections around pressing concerns related to AI’s rapid development, from a Human Rights and ethics perspective. These range from AI’s role in the futures of education to the omnipresent challenges of disinformation and hate speech online.

In this context, UNESCO publishes the results of a survey intended to establish the priorities and capacity building needs of African countries concerning AI. The potential benefits and risks of the technology are not equally distributed across regions of the world. In 2019, as part of UNESCO’s reflections on AI in Africa, the publication Steering AI and Advanced ICTs for Knowledge Societies highlighted that there is a significant gap in terms of access to knowledge, data, education, training and human resources required for the development and use of AI on the continent.

The key findings of the survey in Africa are:

• Policy initiatives for AI governance need strengthening
• Legal and regulatory frameworks for AI governance need to be fostered
• Need for enhancing capacities for AI Governance is widely recognized
• AI priorities for countries in Africa are varied but offer an opportunity for cooperation. These priorities include the need for attention to:
  • Personal data protection and data governance
  • Leveraging AI for economic growth, development and digital transformation
  • Updating education, skills and training systems
  • Facilitating AI research and development
• The survey calls for steps to address:
  • Ethical implications of AI systems:
  • Implications of AI for cultural diversity
  • Gender biases in the development and use of AI systems

The 32 Member States in Africa who responded to the survey have underlined the importance of UNESCO’s work concerning AI in the fields of education, sciences, culture and communication and information.  They requested UNESCO’s support for standard-setting, policy advise, capacity building, network development and for addressing gender equality related concerns in the development and use of AI.

As UNESCO develops its programmes to support the Member States to harness the potential of innovation and the digital transformation, it invites international, regional and national development partners to join hands with UNESCO in addressing the challenges and leveraging the opportunities for the development and use of AI in Africa as highlighted in this report.

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A global survey of 1,502 software engineers, systems and technical architects, engineers and decision-makers conducted by O’Reilly, a publisher of IT training materials, finds nearly three-quarters of survey respondents (72%) have adopted microservices.

More surprisingly, 92% of those respondents report being successful, although the report doesn’t specify what defines success. However, it’s widely perceived that microservices are difficult to master.

Respondents who used containers to deploy and manage them were significantly more likely to report success than those who didn’t, the survey finds. Almost half (49%) of respondents who describe their deployments as “a complete success” also instantiate at least 75% of their microservices in containers. In sum, 62% of respondents use containers to deploy at least some of their microservices, according to the survey.

However, less than a third of respondents (29%) report they are migrating or implementing a majority of their systems using microservices. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations have been using them for a year or more, with 28% having employed them for at least three years.

Mike Loukides, vice president of content strategy for O’Reilly, said it’s clear organizations are widely embracing microservices to build applications that are more flexible and resilient when employed at scale.

Additionally, the survey finds teams who own the software life cycle succeed with microservices at a rate that is 18% higher than those who don’t. Nearly three-quarters (74%) say their teams own the build-test-deploy-maintain phases of the software life cycle. Almost half of those teams (49%) report being at least “mostly successful” with microservices, with 10% reporting that their microservices development efforts were a “complete success.”

The top three barriers of adoption include complexity in one form or another (56%), corporate culture (40%) and decomposing monolithic applications into microservices (37%).

Microservices trace their lineage back to service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, because they make use of application programming interfaces (APIs), it’s become feasible to build and deploy microservices that are more granular, Loukides notes. That approach makes it possible to not only build applications that perform better than legacy SOA applications but also IT teams can more easily rip and replace microservices based on containers, he says.

It’s not clear how often IT organizations may have initially started down a path toward building an application using microservices only to retreat back toward a more familiar monolithic architecture.

However, as more IT teams familiarize themselves with container technologies such as Kubernetes, the rate at which microservices-based applications should increase in the months ahead. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s also more probable those applications will be built and deployed in the cloud, given the fact that no one knows for sure how long both developers and end users alike will be working from home to help curb the pandemic. The one thing that is certain, however, is as IT teams embrace microservices more extensively, the more likely it becomes they will rely on best DevOps practices to achieve that goal.

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The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of API management platform provider Kong, polled 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Among the results, 89% of technology leaders agree that companies that are not able to effectively support microservices will be less able to compete in the future.

The report also finds on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).

Kong CTO Marco Palladino said the report makes it clear that just about every organization is on a journey to making a transition to microservices as part of an effort to reduce reliance on inflexible monolithic applications. Initially, that transition involves lifting and shifting monolithic applications in the cloud before decoupling functions using microservices, he said.

As part of that journey, Palladino noted, the survey also finds significant microservices challenges remain, including ensuring security (36%), integration with legacy applications (32%), the complexity of management (31%) and updating API documentation (31%).

Despite these concerns, however, more than 80% of survey respondents who have adopted microservices report that their organization performs well against metrics for development efficiency, the ability to use new platforms, collaboration across teams and sharing of services across applications.

Overall, a full 90% of respondents said securely connecting applications and ensuring performance at scale collectively represent one of the greatest technical challenges of the 21st century. Also, 71% said they believe that organizations would be out of business within six years if they fail to keep pace with innovation in their industry. For public companies, the urgency is even greater, with 39% reporting they believe organizations will be out of business in less than three years if they fail to keep pace with innovation. Overall, 57% of technology leaders feel organizations are concerned that they are at risk of competitive displacement.

Pressure on IT leaders is high as a result. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) agree that a failed digital transformation effort will result in a missed promotion, lost bonus or even termination. The report identifies the top three priorities for IT leaders as improving efficiency (47%), reducing cost (41%) and increasing security (40%).

Technology leaders, however, continue to place the highest importance on the availability (75%), security (74%), performance (65%) and scalability (64%). At the same time, technology leaders are focused on faster development speeds (95%), increased collaboration (94%) and reduced deployment risks (93%) as key desired outcomes for adopting any new technologies.

The challenges most cited in terms of achieving those agility goals are the complexity of using multiple technologies (35%), lack of automation (32%) and reliance on legacy technologies (29%).

The survey also notes 83% of organizations are relying on open source software to become more agile. The most commonly used open source technologies are databases (64%), containers (48%), API gateways (41%), infrastructure automation (40%), container orchestration (37%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (36%).

In terms of cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure (43%) narrowly beat Amazon Web Services (AWS) (42%), with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) coming in third at 27%.

On the plus side, 78% of respondents said their organizations are increasing IT budgets in the coming year, with 27% of public companies expecting their budgets to grow 26% or more. Nearly 90% of companies will also be increasing headcount, with 56% hiring internally and 31% relying on more freelancers and/or outsourcing to meet hiring goals.

Hopefully, with that increased funding more organizations will be able to strike that elusive balance between stability and innovation.

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Job-seekers owning demonstrable experience with data may soon overtake those with data science degrees when it comes to openings in international enterprises, according to a major survey of global business decision-makers commissioned by data and analytics firm Qlik, on behalf of the Data Literacy Project.

Almost two-thirds (59 per cent) of both global and APAC enterprises surveyed ranked prior job experience or a case study interview (where candidates are tasked with solving hypothetical business problems) as the top indicator of a candidate’s data literacy. By contrast, only 18 per cent globally and 15 per cent in APAC viewed a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in science — let alone data science — or even a Doctorate degree as a primary consideration when hiring.

This means the opportunity to take advantage of improved career prospects and salaries associated with data literacy is not limited to those with degrees in data science or STEM subjects. This follows a wider trend identified by Glassdoor that an increasing number of technology companies are ditching the degree in favour of these skills, helping candidates get their foot in the door.

Most businesses (63 per cent globally and 57 per cent in APAC) are actively looking for candidates who can demonstrate their ability to use, work with and analyse data. Indeed, those with a foundational understanding of data and analytics will account for one-third of the job market, with a projected increase of 110,000 positions by 2020, a 14 per cent increase since 2015, according to IBM.

This is perhaps unsurprising given the massive growth opportunity for data literate organisations, those with higher levels of individual data skills, data dispersion across the enterprise, and data decision-making. Qlik’s Data Literacy Index revealed that large enterprises, which are more data literate, experience a 3 to 5 per cent higher enterprise value (the total market value of the business), representing an additional USD 320- 534 million for the surveyed organisations.

But DSA (Data Science and Analytics) jobs, which include all data-informed roles, from data scientists and data analysts to business analysts and data-enabled marketing managers, are the hardest to fill, typically remaining open for 45 days.

With a crisis affecting the entire data skills spectrum, and notably just 24 per cent of global employees confident in their data literacy abilities, these highly sought-after skills can help people become more valuable to employers and translate into higher personal income.

While not all business leaders surveyed were aware of how their firm remunerates data literate employees, Qlik’s survey revealed that 75 per cent of those up to speed on their company’s policy reported paying higher salaries to employees with the ability to read, work with, analyse and engage with data.

Despite recognising the value of on-the-job experience and data certifications, 50 per cent of companies globally said they don’t provide data literacy training to their own employees. Only 34 per cent of decision-makers globally and 36 per cent in APAC state they have programs in place. This is despite 78 per cent of global employees and 72 per cent of APAC employees saying they would be willing to invest more time and energy into improving their data skill sets.

Those individuals motivated to pursue their own upskilling have the opportunity to supercharge their career and unlock new opportunities, particularly as data grows in importance across all enterprises. Eighteen percent (18 per cent) of business decision-makers globally and 21 per cent in APAC said that a data-skills certification (something that can be earned well after college or formal education) was the best indicator of a candidate’s data literacy and demonstrated the ability to use the techniques most required today.

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