I could stand to lose a few pounds and I know what I need to do: watch my diet and exercise regularly. Knowing, of course, is not the same as doing, and the doing takes effort. Maybe a spoonful of branding and marketing sugar will help the medicine go down. Let’s see. It’s not a diet, it’s the SlimZone PaleoFlex Program. Eat your favorite foods and in six months you’ll be buying all new pants. It’s not exercise, it’s the Elast-i-Ball RollerFit System. Just ten minutes a day to a trimmer toned new you. It’s not Data Curation, it’s Data Product Management.
And it worked for a little while.
It wasn’t so long ago that Data Products were the Next Big Thing, and many of us were very hopeful. After all, Data Products basically consist of data, metadata, validation, access, and management. Stuff we’ve been advocating for a long time. Even better, the business was driving IT to do it!
Maybe it wasn’t Data Curation in the way we had imagined, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
Vendors developed Data Product marketplace software, or added marketplace features to existing products. Consultancies offered Data Product implementation services. Several companies took the paradigm and ran with it, creating their own marketplace interfaces and workflows. It was at the top of everybody’s To Do List.
Until it wasn’t.
In the wake of the pandemic, Data Products seem to have dropped off the radar, most likely the result of two factors. First, to do them right you have to do all the Data Curation stuff that most everyone has been resisting all along. The diet and exercise. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice. You have to know where the data came from, what it means, how it was produced, what it’s supposed to contain, and who’s allowed to access it. This requires a level of support and discipline that, in most companies, has always been lacking. In addition, Data Products must be continuously maintained and quality checked. Back up another truckload of support and discipline please, because corporate altruism only gets you so far when a request for a Data Product correction or enhancement clashes with the delivery of a new business capability. Might as well just create a departmental Data Mart or a summary to share with my workgroup.
Second, Data Products got totally blown out of the water by the next Next Big Thing: Generative AI. One of the biggest Next Big Things ever. All of the support and discipline and prioritization and effort and funding was redirected over there. To nobody’s surprise.
But an interesting thing is happening.
Companies are beginning to recognize that Generative AI requires high-quality, well understood data.
Oftentimes this is because they’re experiencing the negative impact of low-quality or poorly understood data on their models. Data Products to the rescue!! If somebody else can understand and certify the data for me, then I can use it confidently. This demand is the engine that will propel Data Curation efforts.
I was excited to see Data Products introduced as a new entrant on the Innovation Trigger portion of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Management in 2023. A recent study found that 80% of respondents were using or considering the use of Data Products. Take that number with a grain of salt, though: 48% included analytics and AI capabilities under the umbrella of Data Products (which is why it’s important to read the small print) while 30% viewed Data Products as reusable data assets.
We’ll talk more about Data Products in upcoming articles, but for now I’d just like to say, “Welcome Back!”
