Currently, data economy commodities such as data products and data services are consumed by data scientists and data engineers. They are rather technical and use similar tools compared to more traditional developers. According to State of Data Science 2020 report, data scientists use 45 percent of their time in preparing the data for actual use. It could be worse. In some surveys in the past, data prep tasks have occupied upwards of 70% to 80% of a data scientist’s time.
Data preparation and cleansing takes valuable time away from real data science work and has a negative impact on business and overall job satisfaction. This efficiency gap presents an opportunity for the industry to work on solutions to this problem, as one has yet to emerge.
The above describes the current situation. Change is inevitable and that applies to the data economy as well. A couple of connected trends are going to change what is considered as the primary customer in the data economy.
Future customer is 80% of your staff
In a larger scope, the common customer for data commodities is going to be 80% of the staff in companies. Data is the core of all business development and more in the future. Usage of data should not be the exclusive right of data scientists. Currently, they create dashboards for the rest of the company. The shortage of skilled data scientists and engineers slows the adoption of data-driven decision-making already now. Also, the ability to interpret charts, trends, and numbers is something we all must learn. That is in short referenced as Data Literacy. We all must take advantage of the data in the future and faster than before. How? That is the second connected trend and discussed next.
Future customer is a business developer
Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted an LCAP as one of their strategic application platforms. LCAP stands for "low-code application platforms" which deliver high-productivity and multifunction capabilities across central, departmental, and citizen IT functions.
In plain words, the above means that non-traditional developers start to develop small applications which naturally use data as feed. The above is already starting to become reality. For example Salesforce has low-code platform and 79% of their customers use applications made with the platform. Salesforce has built the capability by developing solutions but also with purchases like buying (2018) Mulesoft (integration platform) for 6,5 Billion and Tableau (2019) for 15,3 Billion dollars. The former enables data flows and latter data visualisation with modern tools and methods.
So the low-code / no-code platforms are the future "Node.js". Which of the platform candidates is the winning one, still remains open.
