Three decades into the data revolution, my fellow technologists and I find ourselves asking an existential — and rather distressing — question: What happened to the promise of customer 360? The ability to get more customer data was supposed to fundamentally change the relationship between customers and brands. Companies were going to be able to offer targeted, meaningful engagements that would multiply average deal size and slash time to close.

OKRs have taken corporate planning by storm — and for good reason. As a system for organization-wide goal-setting, OKRs make executive KPIs tangible and actionable, not just for the leaders, but for everyone in the company. They have become increasingly common in all types of businesses because they are simple and effective. For the company’s data champion, they also offer an unparalleled opportunity to get everyone speaking a common language of metrics.

Globe Telecom, one of the largest providers of digital services in the Philippines, was operating in a saturated market with limited opportunity to expand. Any strategy for growth depended on nurturing customer relationships and fostering lifelong value with each customer. For Globe Telecom, getting customer data was never the problem — telecom companies produce terabytes of data every day.

To IT leaders, it’s obvious that data strategy deserves a special place at the table for any discussion about strategic business initiatives. However, for CMOs and CROs like myself, who must justify and weigh expenditures against bottom line impact, investing in customer data typically looks like a red-ink proposition.

Data may be everywhere, but it isn’t free. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure to turn raw data into useful insights. Research suggests that the cost of handling data is only going to increase, by as much as 50% over five years. The same source suggests that part of that cost comes from confusion — users may spend up to 40% of their time searching for data and up to 30% of their time on data cleansing. The issue here is data trust.

We all know the world is changing in profound ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen businesses, teams, and people all adapting — showing incredible resilience to keep moving forward despite the headwinds. To shed some light on what to expect in 2022 and beyond, let’s look at five major trends with regard to data. We’ve been watching these particular data trends since before the pandemic and seen them gain steam across sectors in the post-pandemic world.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re stranded on a data island, scratching “SOS” in the sand in hopes of catching the eye of anyone who can rescue you. Companies everywhere are facing an explosion of data — with more data sources, more shadow IT, more people demanding access, and a growing number of business problems that can only be solved with data. As your company’s data leader, every one of those problems lands on you.

When you take your car in for a repair, it’s almost inevitable that the mechanic will identify additional problems you didn’t realize you had. But there’s positive flip side to that coin — sometimes when you solve one problem, you end up unexpectedly creating solutions for other challenges—that was the case for this global automotive supplier. In 2019, this automotive supplier set a goal and created a roadmap to integrate its master data.

The value of healthy data is obvious. But how do you build that practice in your own business? The difference between people who live a healthy lifestyle and those who don’t isn’t whether they know how to be healthier — it’s whether or not they prioritize diet, sleep, and exercise in their daily life. The same is true for your data: if you don’t have the infrastructure that supports your customer 360 initiatives , those initiatives become moot.

It’s official — Self-Service Data APIs are available as a new feature of Data Inventory! Highly skilled and less-technical users can now make their datasets available to applications and partners via APIs in just a few clicks. Self-Service Data APIs empower every permissioned employee to leverage data across the business to generate valuable insights or even extend data availability beyond the organization to trusted partners.