Member Article

Companies are under-achieveing in data management

According to a new report from SAS, more than 66% of data management leaders believe they have an effective data management strategy. Furthermore, they believe they are approaching data cleansing and analytics in the right way. The report goes on to says that approximately 10% of companies it classes as ‘laggards’, also believe the same thing.

The problem is obvious really – for every leader there is, there is a laggard. So naturally, SAS has come to the conclusion that ‘many companies are falling short in data management’. ‘Falling short’ has been measuring using money as the value and expand on this by explaining that big data analytics and IoT (internet of things), could amass to £322 BILLION between 2015 and 2020, so ‘falling short’ is really ‘falling a significant amount’ and losing a vast amount of money.

The ‘Data Management Maturity’ survey was commissioned by SAS to survey 600 senior level business decision makers across UK businesses. Organisations were scored of their approach to data management based on three levels of maturity:

Advanced (leaders) Average (mainstreamers) Basic (laggards)

The survey concluded that all types of leaders are faced with the same obstacles, but the approach on how to address the problems and deal with them differs: leaders are more proactive and therefore able to benefit from data analytics.

The survey also found that lack of internal skills, lack of innovation and relevance to wider business are the top three obstacles currently faced by leaders. This is the same for the top obstacles faced by laggards, except as the table below shows, the proportions are significantly different.

Lack of innovation: (Leaders) 30% (Laggards) 50%

Lack of internal skills: (Leaders) 38% (Laggards) 62%

Relevance to wider business (Leaders) 31% (Laggards) 46%

The research continued to assess the effects of having a clear approach to data strategy, cleansing and analytics. Gaining maximum insights from data analytics was achieved by overcoming the volume of data by 75% of leaders compared to just 44% of laggards. For example, 68% of leaders review their data strategy monthly and are therefore reaping the benefits such as improved analysis (90%), better decision making (88%), stronger data value (88%) and simplified analysis (88%).

These figures have resulted in 93% of leaders agreeing that their data strategy has provided the analytics needed to innovate and improve existing business processes. Furthermore,91% are now also investing in the appropriate talent to drive it forward and ensure that their team and objectives are in line with the data strategy.

Hugo D’Ulisse, Head of Analytical Platform, SAS UK & Ireland, said: “Organisations that are benefiting from analytics look to the long-term and recognise the importance of continuously improving their data management strategies. Businesses need to focus on looking inwards at training staff.”

“Organisations also need to develop innovation and reassess how they are managing data in order to truly reap the rewards and get ahead of the competition.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Victoria Wilson .