Today, most technology aficionados think of data engineering as the capabilities associated with traditional data preparation and data integration including data cleansing, data normalization and standardization, data quality, data enrichment, metadata management and data governance.  But that definition of data engineering is insufficient to derive and drive new sources of society, business and operational value. The Field of Data Engineering brings together data management (data cleansing, quality, integration, enrichment, governance) and data science (machine learning, deep learning, data lakes, cloud) functions and includes standards, systems design and architectures.

There are two critical economic-based principles that will underpin the field of Data Engineering:

Principle #1:  Curated data never depletes, never wears out and can be used an unlimited number of use cases at a near zero marginal cost.

Principle #2:  Data assets appreciate, not depreciate, in value the more that they are used; that is, the more these data assets are used, the more accurate, more reliable, more efficient and safer they become.

There have been significant exponential technology advancements in the past few years ; data engineering is the most topical of them. Burgeoning data velocity , data trajectory , data insertion , data mediation & wrangling , data lakes & cloud security & infrastructure have revolutionized the data engineering stream. Data engineering has reinvented itself from being passive data aggregation tools from BI/DW arena to critical to business function. As unprecedented advancements are slated to occur in the next few years, there is a need for additional focus on data engineering. The foundations of AI acceleration is underpinned by robust data engineering capabilities.

YourStory & AIQRATE curated and unveiled a seminal report on “Data Engineering 4.0: Evolution , Emergence & Possibilities in the next decade.” A first in the area , the report covers a broad spectrum on key drivers of growth for Data Engineering 4.0 and highlights the incremental impact of data engineering in the time to come due to emergence of 5G , Quantum Computing & Cloud Infrastructure. The report also covers a comprehensive section on applications across industry segments of smart cities , autonomous vehicles , smart factories and the ensuing adoption of data engineering capabilities in these segments. Further , it dwells on the significance of incubating data engineering capabilities for deep tech startups for gaining competitive edge and enumerates salient examples of data driven companies in India that are leveraging data engineering prowess . The report also touches upon the data legislation and privacy aspects by proposing certain regulations and suggesting revised ones to ensure end to end protection of individual rights , security & safety of the ecosystem. Data Engineering 4.0 will be an overall trojan horse in the exponential technology landscape and much of the adoption acceleration that AI needs to drive ; will be dependent on the advancements in data engineering area.

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AI is invoking shifts in the business value chains of enterprises. And it is redefining what it takes for enterprises to achieve competitive advantage. Yet, even as several enterprises have begun applying AI engagements with impressive results, few have developed full-scale AI capabilities that are systemic and enterprise wide.

The power of AI is changing business as we know it. AIQRATE AI@scale advisory services allow you to transform your operating model, so you can move beyond isolated AI use cases toward an enterprise wide program and realize the full value potential.

We have realized that that unleashing the true power of AI requires scaling it across the entire business functions and value chain and its calls for “transforming the business “.

An AI@scale transformation should occur through a series of top-down and bottom-up actions to create alignment, buy-in, and follow-through. This ensures the successful industrialization of AI across enterprises and their value chains.

The following strategic interventions are to be initiated to build AI@scale transformation program:

• AI Maturity Assessment: This strategic top-down establishes the overall context of the transformation and helps prevent the enterprises from pursuing isolated AI pilots. The maturity assessment is typically based on a blend of AI masterclass, surveys and assessments
• Strategic AI Initiatives and business value chains: This bottom-up step provides a baseline of current AI initiatives. It should include goals, business cases, accountabilities, work streams, and milestones in addition to an analysis of data management, algorithms, performance metrics. A review of the current business value chain and proposed transformational structure should also be conducted at this stage.
• Strategic mapping & gap Analysis: The next top-down step prioritizes AI initiatives, focusing on easy wins and low hanging fruits. This step also identifies the required changes to the operating business model.
• AI@scale transformation program: This critical strategic step consists of both the transformation roadmap, including the order of initiatives to be rolled out, and the creation of a planned program management approach to oversee the transformation.
• AI@scale implementation: This covers implementation, detailing the work streams, responsibilities, targets, milestones, talent and partner mapping. 

By systematically moving through these steps, the implementation of AI@scale will proceed with much greater speed and certainty. Enterprises must be aware that AI@scale requires deep transformative changes and need strategic and operational buy ins from management for long term business gains and impact . 

AIQRATE works closely with global & Indian enterprises , GCC’s , VC/PE firms to provide end-to-end AI@scale advisory services

Artificial intelligence is getting ubiquitous and is transforming organizations globally. AI is no longer just a technology. It is now one of the most important lenses that business leaders need to look through to identify new business models, new sources of revenue and bring in critical efficiencies in how they do businesses.

Artificial intelligence has quickly moved beyond bits and pieces of topical experiments in the innovation lab. AI needs to be weaved into the fabric of business. Indeed, if you see the companies leading with AI today, one of the common denominators is that there is a strong executive focus around artificial intelligence. AI transformation can be successful when there is a strong mandate coming from the top and leaders make it a strategic priority for their enterprise.

Given AI’s importance to the enterprise, it is fair to say that AI will not only shape the future of the enterprise, but also the future for those that lead the enterprise mandate on artificial intelligence.

Curiosity and Adaptability

To lead with AI in the enterprise, top executives will need to demonstrate high levels of adaptability and agility. Leaders need to develop a mindset to harness the strategic shifts that AI will bring in an increasingly dynamic landscape of business – which will require extreme agility. Leaders that succeed in this AI era will need to be able to build capable, agile teams that can rapidly take cognizance of how AI can be a game changer in their area of business and react accordingly. Agile teams across the enterprise will be a cornerstone of better leadership in this age of AI.

Leading with AI will also require leaders to be increasingly curious. The paradigm of conducting business in this new world is evolving faster than ever. Leaders will need to ensure that they are on top of the recent developments in the dual realms of business and technology. This requires CXOs to be positively curious and constantly on the lookout for game changing solutions that can have a discernible impact on their topline and bottom-line.

Clarity of Vision

Leadership in the AI era will be strongly characterized by the strength and clarity with which leaders communicate their vision. Leaders with an inherently strong sense of purpose and an eye for details will be forged as organizations globally witness AI transformation.

It is not only important for those that lead with AI to have a clear vision. It is equally important to maintain a razor sharp focus on the execution aspect. When it comes to scaling artificial intelligence in the organization, the devil is very often in the details – the data and algorithms that disrupt existing business processes. For leaders to be successful, they must remain attentive to the trifecta of factors – completeness of their vision for AI transformation, communication of said vision to relevant stakeholders and monitoring the entire execution process. While doing so, it is important to remain agile and flexible as mentioned in my earlier section – in order to be aware of possible business landscape shifts on the horizon.

Engage with High EQ

AI transformation can often seem to be all about hard numbers and complex algorithms. However, leaders need to also infuse the human element to succeed in their efforts to deliver AI @ Scale. The third key for top executives to lead in the age of AI is to ensure that they marry high IQs with equally or perhaps higher levels of EQ.

Why is this so very important? Given the state of this technology today, it is important that we build systems that are completely free of bias and are fair in how they arrive at strategic and tactical decisions. AI learns from the data that it is provided and hence it is important to ensure that the data it is fed is free from bias – which requires a human aspect. Secondly, AI causes severe consternation among the working population – with fears of job loss abounding. It is important to ensure that these irrational fears of an ‘AI Takeover’ are effectively abated. For AI to be successful, it is important that both types of intelligence – artificial and human – symbiotically coexist to deliver transformational results.

AI is undoubtedly going to become one of the sources of lasting competitive advantage for enterprises. According to research, 4 out of 5 C-level executives believe that their future business strategy will be informed through opportunities made available by AI technology. This requires a leadership mindset that is AI-first and can spot opportunities for artificial intelligence solutions to exploit. By democratizing AI solutions across the organization, enterprises can ensure that their future leadership continues to prioritize the deployment of this technology in use cases where they can deliver maximum impact.

In most ways, Internet of Things analytics are like any other analytics. However, the need to distribute some IoT analytics to edge sites, and to use some technologies not commonly employed elsewhere, requires business intelligence and analytics leaders to adopt new best practices and software.

There are certain prominent challenges that Analytics Vendors are facing in venturing into building a capability. IoT analytics use most of the same algorithms and tools as other kinds of advanced analytics. However, a few techniques occur much more often in IoT analytics, and many analytics professionals have limited or no expertise in these. Analytics leaders are struggling to understand where to start with Internet of Things (IoT) analytics. They are not even sure what technologies are needed.

Also, the advent of IoT also leads to collection of raw data in a massive scale. IoT analytics that run in the cloud or in corporate data centers are the most similar to other analytics practices. Where major differences appear is at the “edge” — in factories, connected vehicles, connected homes and other distributed sites. The staple inputs for IoT analytics are streams of sensor data from machines, medical devices, environmental sensors and other physical entities. Processing this data in an efficient and timely manner sometimes requires event stream processing platforms, time series database management systems and specialized analytical algorithms. It also requires attention to security, communication, data storage, application integration, governance and other considerations beyond analytics. Hence it is imperative to evolve into edge analytics and distribute the data processing load all across.

Hence, some IoT analytics applications have to be distributed to “edge” sites, which makes them harder to deploy, manage and maintain. Many analytics and Data Science practitioners lack expertise in the streaming analytics, time series data management and other technologies used in IoT analytics.

Some visions of the IoT describe a simplistic scenario in which devices and gateways at the edge send all sensor data to the cloud, where the analytic processing is executed, and there are further indirect connections to traditional back-end enterprise applications. However, this describes only some IoT scenarios. In many others, analytical applications in servers, gateways, smart routers and devices process the sensor data near where it is generated — in factories, power plants, oil platforms, airplanes, ships, homes and so on. In these cases, only subsets of conditioned sensor data, or intermediate results (such as complex events) calculated from sensor data, are uploaded to the cloud or corporate data centers for processing by centralized analytics and other applications.

The design and development of IoT analytics — the model building — should generally be done in the cloud or in corporate data centers. However, analytics leaders need to distribute runtime analytics that serve local needs to edge sites. For certain IoT analytical applications, they will need to acquire, and learn how to use, new software tools that provide features not previously required by their analytics programs. These scenarios consequently give us the following best practices to be kept in mind:

Develop Most Analytical Models in the Cloud or at a Centralized Corporate Site

When analytics are applied to operational decision making, as in most IoT applications, they are usually implemented in a two-stage process – In the first stage, data scientists study the business problem and evaluate historical data to build analytical models, prepare data discovery applications or specify report templates. The work is interactive and iterative.

A second stage occurs after models are deployed into operational parts of the business. New data from sensors, business applications or other sources is fed into the models on a recurring basis. If it is a reporting application, a new report is generated, perhaps every night or every week (or every hour, month or quarter). If it is a data discovery application, the new data is made available to decision makers, along with formatted displays and predefined key performance indicators and measures. If it is a predictive or prescriptive analytic application, new data is run through a scoring service or other model to generate information for decision making.

The first stage is almost always implemented centrally, because Model building typically requires data from multiple locations for training and testing purposes. It is easier, and usually less expensive, to consolidate and store all this data centrally. Also, It is less expensive to provision advanced analytics and BI platforms in the cloud or at one or two central corporate sites than to license them for multiple distributed locations.

The second stage — calculating information for operational decision making — may run either at the edge or centrally in the cloud or a corporate data center. Analytics are run centrally if they support strategic, tactical or operational activities that will be carried out at corporate headquarters, at another edge location, or at a business partner’s or customer’s site.

Distribute the Runtime Portion of Locally Focused IoT Analytics to Edge Sites

Some IoT analytics applications need to be distributed, so that processing can take place in devices, control systems, servers or smart routers at the sites where sensor data is generated. This makes sure the edge location stays in operation even when the corporate cloud service is down. Also, wide-area communication is generally too slow for analytics that support time-sensitive industrial control systems.

Thirdly, transmitting all sensor data to a corporate or cloud data center may be impractical or impossible if the volume of data is high or if reliable, high-bandwidth networks are unavailable. It is more practical to filter, condition and do analytic processing partly or entirely at the site where the data is generated.

Train Analytics Staff and Acquire Software Tools to Address Gaps in IoT-Related Analytics Capabilities

Most IoT analytical applications use the same advanced analytics platforms, data discovery tools as other kinds of business application. The principles and algorithms are largely similar. Graphical dashboards, tabular reports, data discovery, regression, neural networks, optimization algorithms and many other techniques found in marketing, finance, customer relationship management and advanced analytics applications also provide most aspects of IoT analytics.

However, a few aspects of analytics occur much more often in the IoT than elsewhere, and many analytics professionals have limited or no expertise in these. For example, some IoT applications use event stream processing platforms to process sensor data in near real time. Event streams are time series data, so they are stored most efficiently in databases (typically column stores) that are designed especially for this purpose, in contrast to the relational databases that dominate traditional analytics. Some IoT analytics are also used to support decision automation scenarios in which an IoT application generates control signals that trigger actuators in physical devices — a concept outside the realm of traditional analytics.

In many cases, companies will need to acquire new software tools to handle these requirements. Business analytics teams need to monitor and manage their edge analytics to ensure they are running properly and determine when analytic models should be tuned or replaced.

Increased Growth, if not Competitive Advantage

The huge volume and velocity of data in IoT will undoubtedly put new levels of strain on networks. The increasing number of real-time IoT apps will create performance and latency issues. It is important to reduce the end-to-end latency among machine-to-machine interactions to single-digit milliseconds. Following the best practices of implementing IoT analytics will ensure judo strategy of increased effeciency output at reduced economy. It may not be suffecient to define a competitive strategy, but as more and more players adopt IoT as a mainstream, the race would be to scale and grow as quickly as possible.