When writing a blog post about predictions for next year a common way to start is to explain why your last year predictions in a way was true.
Well, my foreseeing for 2016 was called My 2016 MDM Clairvoyance. This included gut feelings about Master Data Management (MDM) including Product Information Management (PIM).
One hunch was about mergers. There is still two weeks left to see that coming true.
Another guess was about shortage of MDM people and more agile MDM implementations. Perhaps that was right.
The bet that certainly happened was about only one Gartner MDM magic quadrant. Though it is delayed – as reported in the post The Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM 2016 – it will according to my sources land in 2016.
The burning issue for me in 2017 is how many companies that will abandon spreadsheets as the mean to exchange product information with trading partners and resist the temptation to set up a selfish supplier or customer product data portal? The potential numbers was examined in the post Alternatives to Product Data Lake.
Or put in another way: How many subscribers will we have at Product Data Lake by the end of 2017? My guess is 1111. In a year I will reveal if this number is expressed as a binary number, a decimal number or a hex number.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 