In my previous Celent research I have highlighted two levers for jumpstarting the capabilities of the advisor. These are digitization and machine-based artificial intelligence, or AI. My most recent report, A New Take on Data: From Information Capture to Advisor-Driven Efficiency, argues that efforts to engage these levers must start with a foundational review of the way enterprise information is managed.

Data Swamp

A “capture first, sort later” approach to information management has led to the construction of vast data lakes whose processing capabilities outstrip the needs and capabilities of the organization. In many organizations, what purports to be a data lake will in fact be a data swamp; in essence, not that different from the clumsy, centralized data repository the data lake was meant to replace.

Less is More

One hunch confirmed during the course of my research is that enterprise consumers desire an improvement in the quality of the data already captured, particularly that sourced within the firm, rather than more or “different” data.

Data Diet

In addition to going on an overdue data diet, these firms are employing data wrangling techniques (and more generally, data fabric or unified data architecture) designed not to tear down internal information silos, but to work around them.

My colleagues Kelley Byrnes, Brad Bailey, and I recently held a roundtable in London entitled Digital, Data and the Democratisation of Wealth and Asset Management where I discussed wrangling solutions on the market and some use cases. Readers interested in these observations should reach out to me directly.