Company data today is like a womans handbag, says Bill McGloin, Practice Leader for Data Optimisation, Computacenter. It may hold a lot, but actually finding anything in it is practically impossible. As European markets grow ever leaner and more competitive, organisations which simply store data will find it harder to thrive. Using analytics to understand and exploit data will continue to increase in importance but its clear from this report that organisations lack the process and infrastructure to make this a reality.
According to the research, over half of organisations surveyed (52.5%) do not have processes in place to consolidate their data into a structure which allows degrees of Business Intelligence to be applied. This often results in failure to find trends in data, understand where new opportunities lie, or simply makes it harder for organisations to find data to comply with audit requirements. Over a third (37.6%) of organisations surveyed admitted to struggling with legislation, which carries the risk of stern fines from the Information Commissioners Office, for example.
Although companies now have enough storage performance to cope with data, they may not have the data structure which would make business analytics possible, continues McGloin. This not only means that they will fail to exploit data to its fullest advantage, but costs may start to spiral out of control. Getting on the path to data analytics needs to be a key priority for 2013 if organisations are to effectively compete, innovate and bring new services to market. In what could potentially be a lost decade of growth, companies which fail to prepare should prepare themselves to fail.