Digital Transformation Trends and Outlooks for 2022

2021 was a big year for our team – in April, Passerelle was formed, acquiring Abilis Corp’s non-correctional business assets in the U.S. and Canada. With its formation, Passerelle built on a vision of helping businesses drive action from data with solutions-based engineering and agile development. 

Today, Passerelle has the agility and flexibility to continue to develop innovative, timely solutions that respond to the changing needs of enterprise-minded clients. In the fast-moving world of data-driven leadership, we are ready to respond as innovators and trusted advisors.

How 2021 shifted the data landscape 

COVID-19 hastens push toward digital transformation 

The world turned upside down in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed workplaces and schools and severely disrupted healthcare institutions, supply chain and transportation providers. In its wake, a profound period of digital transformation – schools and offices moved online, e-health and e-learning services expanded, and e-commerce became the lifeline of those sheltered at home.  

In 2021, repercussions of this seismic shift began to be realized.  

• Financial services institutions began to come to terms with a quickly changing consumer behaviors that led to thousands of bank branch closures in the U.S. and U.K. in 2021..  
• Colleges and universities were able to bring students back on campus, thanks in part to public health tracking systems, IoT sensors and technology that provided seamless delivery of hybrid learning environments.  
• Employers of all sized embraced the flexibility of a mobile and remote workforce. With the new reality of hybrid workforces, employees can live anywhere, and have all the tools to collaborate and contribute to their teams. This was already Passerelle’s mode of operation – we will always be a ”work-from-anywhere” employer. 

Data Decision Making moves to the frontline of the pandemic 

Perhaps no industry was impacted more by the COVID 19 pandemic than healthcare. Since the earliest onset of COVID-19, big data has been an essential component of public health response, enabling contact tracing, needs and liability assessments and vaccine distribution logistics. In 2021, Passerelle worked with software developer Dimagi to support development of CommCare – a no-code app builder used to build custom solutions that help frontline healthcare workers. In Data Rocket, Dimagi found an end-to-end data architecture that pulls data from CommCare’s multiple source systems — including local, county, and state health information — and integrates datasets so they are readily available for uniform reporting. CommCare makes it possible for stakeholders with little technical experience to easily access data and use data to make informed decisions, and is being used throughout the United States to uniform healthcare response.  

Organizations look to expand digital footprint 

As a result of lessons learned in 2020, organizations of every size are looking to expand on digital footprints. The luxury of being proactive with digital transformation is likely a thing of the past – many organizations must now contend with new data sources, including ecommerce, online platforms, employee management, health tracking information, and IoT data. In order to make data-informed decisions in a timely way, organizations must figure out how to utilize new data sources, while making historical data and data from traditional sources usable, trustworthy and readily available. 

In this climate, Data Rocket has been adopted by organizations in financial services, energy, manufacturing and healthcare, as an end-to-end solution that transforms data architecture. Built with data governance at its core, Data Rocket accelerates governed ingestion from any source system in an organization, bringing clean, ready-to-use data into the Snowflake Data Cloud. By creating a curated, sophisticated data cloud environment, data is readily available for advanced applications, including machine learning modeling, and augmentation with 3^rd party and enriched 1^st party data sets.   

Looking Ahead – Digital transformation in 2022

2022, like every year, will see innovation and disruption, as new technologies emerge and as organizations continues to adapt to changing marketplaces.  Here are some of the biggest stories we predict for 2022: 

2022 is the year of 3^rd Party Data* 

Digital transformation has been on the lips of data decision-makers for years, but 2022 will be the year of 3^rd party data*. With Snowflake’s Data Marketplace, businesses of any size can easily ingest datasets that a year ago were too big, too expensive and too unrefined for any organization without designated business intelligence departments. As an example, Equifax datasets could identify personal wealth to a household level, but were only available as a national data set. At more than 4 TB in size, the entire file is a challenge to work it. Most regional banks need specific regions and would not have the ability to use, let alone the desire to pay for, a national data set. With Snowflake Data Marketplace, a regional bank can ingest a predefined Equifax data set with the click of a button, containing only relevant zip codes and information. These data sets can be used to focus marketing, upsell and cross sell opportunities, and are nothing short of transformative for regional and small enterprise players.  

*It’s not just 3^rd Party Data – Meet Enriched 1^st Party Data  

Another exciting advancement for data decision-making is the availability of enriched first party data through the Snowflake Data Marketplace. With Segmint, financial services organizations can enrich their own data with insights into transactional behavior. Segmint cleanses payment data to provide actionable data, including cleansing and categorizing merchant payment, customer insights from the platform’s Key Lifestyle Indicators® and AI modeling. Plugged into Segmint’s marketing automation, the technology platform provides targeted cross-selling that presents custom-tailored product offering to customers based on their consumer spending and banking activity. 

Data Governance back in spotlight 

As industries worked to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of data governance took a back seat as organizations rapidly expanded digital capabilities. It’s time to talk about data governance again.  

From a strategic perspective, data governance is essential for maintaining a functional data lake environment. Without data governance throughout the data life cycle, even the best cloud storage solution can become mired with duplicates and untrustworthy data – making it unusable for machine learning and unreliable for self-service insights. Data Catalog enables better collaboration and discoverability and are important factors of success to enterprise data platform. 

Passerelle technology partners Talend and Snowflake have emphasized the importance of data quality in product roadmaps for 2022. In fall of 2021, Talend announced its Trust Score will become native to the Snowflake Cloud. With the update, customers will be able to perform reliability checks on Snowflake Data within the Snowflake environment.  

As part of our commitment to superior data governance, Passerelle will release Data Quality Watch as part of Data Rocket’s Q1 2022 release schedule. (See Data Rocket’s 2021 release notes). Data Quality Watch will provide automated profiling, with out of the box data stats and anomalies detection capabilities. Data will be scored on Completeness, Accuracy, Consistency, Validity, Timeliness and Integrity.​ Coupled with Passerelle’s Data Mastering Framework, Data Quality Watch will enable a mature Snowflake Data Cloud environment to support machine learning applications and advanced data applications.

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Access to trustworthy, usable data will continue to be essential as organizations respond to changing consumer needs and marketplace demands. Ready to turn data to action? Contact us today.