Companies today are increasingly striving to base decisions on cold hard facts – as opposed to what their guts tell them. A survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit among 600 corporate leaders across the globe found a growing appetite for data and,perhaps more importantly, a growing emphasis on data-driven decision-making.
Organisations are trying to get their arms around the increasing volumes, types and formats of data, from traditional and digital sources, which companies are creating, storing and consuming – what we know as as Big Data – to make informed, forward-looking decisions.
Indeed, Big Data has become one of those corporate buzzwords which frequently come up in management circles. The promise that Big Data will yield profound value for companies has become so popular, it is often taken as truth. And yet, I get the impression that corporate leaders have not really grasped the significance of developments in this field. This is worrying, as the ability to leverage Big Data is becoming an important success factor for CEOs and corporate leaders in general.
Big Data is quickly becoming everyone’s business. The tools are there, and they’re getting better
The benefits of becoming a more data-focused decision-maker – and ultimately a more data-driven organisation as a whole – come in many forms and depend largely on the individual company. However, data-driven organisations can generally expect to become more responsive to customer needs and to seize business opportunities that may previously have been hidden from view.
I recently had the opportunity to moderate a local forum on Leveraging Big Data as a Source of Competitive Advantage, and from the discussion which unfolded it was evident that data is a new raw material, and if, as a decision-maker you are not managing data, you are not managing your business. This implies that today’s corporate leaders need to become strategic data planners; they should develop analytical skills and learn to ask the right questions. And they should focus on becoming more familiar with the technology that is used to derive valuable business insights from vast data stores.
Historically, data management and analysis were widely considered IT jobs. Recent studies have shown that perception and reality is changing – quickly. In a recent study conducted by business technology solutions firm Avanade, the majority of respondents (58 per cent) reported that data management is now embedded throughout their business operations. More significantly, 95 per cent of businesses with dedicated business analysts do not consider data analysts as part of their IT staff. Instead, companies are now distributing that expertise to line-of-business groups throughout the company. More than half of global companies (59 per cent) say that more employees than ever before are involved in making decisions as a result of more widely available company data. Taken together, these findings point to an ever-greater emphasis by companies to distribute data management, analysis and decision-making power to a wider base of employees. Big Data is quickly becoming everyone’s business.
The tools are there, and they’re getting better. More people have more access to more technology than ever before. Research shows unmistakable signs that technologies used to manage, analyse, report and make business decisions from Big Data are becoming easier to use and are more widely available to employees in companies large and small. This is evidenced by the greater access to technologies that help find, manage and extract value from data. With this change, data-related jobs and skills are permeating a wide variety of departments across these companies.
Having said that, the complexity of the data involved means that there are still major challenges to squeezing all the potential benefits from data management. It is not surprising that in The Economist Intelligence Unit survey mentioned above, finding the right people with the right skills is the number 1 obstacle to launching a successful big data project. The same survey also points to the difficulty of interpreting unstructured data – which includes some 85 per cent of all data, everything from the text found in e-mail and on social media sites to machine-generated logs – as another major challenge.
For those attempting to gain business insights from the data their business is collecting, I would advise that they take the time to reflect and understand their environment, their landscape, where they want to go and what they aspire to be, and engage people that have done this before. Moreover, decision-makers who want to become strategic data planners should begin by gaining a solid understanding of where their data resides. That means looking closely at all of the data sources within the company and creating a plan as to how that information is going to be processed and used.
As I mentioned before, there are great tools out there from a technology standpoint. However, as in most things in business, it’s not just about technology. It’s really about people, technology and process.
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Joseph Micallef is the chief operations officer of Beat.