Data Leaders Series
Ibrahim Elawadi Interview - Data Leaders Series
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So I am Ibrahim. I work with Greenpeace as a Senior Insights Manager. I've been working in the tech and the analytics industry for almost 24 years. Working across many things. Mainly in the last 10 years, supporting global organizations and areas of technical innovation and analytics. Yes, I think I think the best thing about MeasureCamp is that it is very unpredictable. You don't know what's coming. And it's, to some degree, it's a competition. But at the same time, it's really a showcase of the best of what we have in the industry. People here really prioritize sharing. And it's a very special group feeling that I really enjoy. So my takeaway was is really about sharing that knowledge with everyone. I haven't joined all the sessions yet, but I think, so far, it has been a really interesting mix of technical strategy. Food for thought I think mainly, the first thing, would be how to integrate things together. We tended to have data being even in the entire industry. People tend to live in their own silos. So we have, for example, the analysts and then we have the data scientists and then we have the data engineers. We have the statisticians and they work on statistics, and all of those people speak similar language to some degree. But it's on their own fears in their own silos, for each one of those things. They have their own domain of expertise, and I think we are living...we are moving into an era of breaking the silos. So there are many concepts that are speaking of the trend now like, for example, the idea of the data mesh where every domain, every function in the company will own their own data and will provide their own data as a product with other teams. I think this will be an interesting trend that will dominate in the next couple of years, also the area of data governance. I think this will be important because, you know, we are getting the push from the governments, from the regulators, from the people to care more about privacy and with the accessibility of data to everyone. That presents a serious threat to the security of the data and the governance. So we will need more governance at scale in companies. Uh, maybe the interesting third trend would be, the development of open source tools. So these tools, we have this idea always that open source is not reliable.It's, you know, you get it for free, you don't pay for it. You cannot use it in an enterprise level. But, in the last couple of years, this changed dramatically, and there have been many open source tools that are really having a very solid foundation in the market, at all enterprise levels. I think these things will keep growing in the next couple of years, so yeah. Yeah, I think... So, there is a shift in the industry in the last 10 years or even more, towards big data and having more data. And I think what's happening in reality is the opposite. We are getting less data. So now you see, for example, with the regulations on the social media giants or big tech, they are limiting access to their data to comply with the laws. We have access to less data now, in terms of variation. Maybe we have more access to data in terms of quantity, and that will just get worse. But when it comes to the quality of data, we have a serious challenge that we are getting really helpless. So, I think we need to start thinking about how do we get more with less data? I would say the data mesh. One is very interesting because, you know, like we've been moving since 2012 toward the idea of the Data Lake, which is, let's put everything in one place, put all the data from social media, from CRM, from Google Analytics, everything into one massive data lake. But the problem is, this is getting very complicated to manage. You don't have an owner and you don't have someone who's really understanding. What does this data mean? How can we get value out of this data? So there is a move to another direction, which is to not put everything in one place, but it will be in many places, so every team will have their own data. It will be a data lake for each team, and every team will own the data, will understand the data better than everyone, and would provide the data as a product to other departments, which I think is interesting. I think that there is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen with this, but I think it's an interesting turn to look for indeed, and I think maybe the biggest challenge is it's not, an industry-wide trend. So, having this data links for each team means you have you need the data engineers and another set of engineers and everything, which is not affordable by every organization. So that would work for a certain segment of the market. But regardless, I think it's very interesting to see, yeah.