Businesses have the ability to collect massive amounts of data, but a new survey commissioned by SAP reveals most of them are not using it nearly as much as they could be, either to predict future movements or make analytical decisions about the present.
The study, conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC) and entitled ‘Information Culture: Leveraging Collective Insight in the Connected Enterprise’, reveals that 62 per cent of organisations use less than half of the data available to them for decision-making processes.
Surveying people with both IT and business backgrounds, the study also showed that 58 per cent of respondents said their companies based at least half of their business decisions on “gut feelings” instead of gathered information or data.
Just one-third of the respondents said their companies use data to predict future trends or behaviour in their given market, or to actively seek out new business opportunities. However, most of the remaining majority say this is a future plan of their business.
“Our study shows that companies understand the value of information,” said Dr Carsten Bange, founder and CEO, BARC. “But in order to unlock the full potential of their data, they need to address and improve data quality, increase the speed at which information is made available, raise awareness of business intelligence at senior management levels and foster a collaborative style of decision-making.”
The survey indicated that while companies have no problem collecting data, analysing it and incorporating it into their business plans is much trickier. Respondents who think their companies are not utilising data as well as their competitors overwhelmingly agreed that collaborative decision-making is the way to not only process gathered data, but use it to gain advantages in business.
“The best performing companies leverage the power of collective insight by collaborating across the enterprise and using trusted data-discovery tools to nurture an information culture,” said James Fisher, vice president, product marketing, analytics and mobile solutions, SAP.
“Analytics solutions from SAP can help businesses achieve their decision-making goals by extracting meaning from data that can help drive real growth. By putting leading analytics solutions into the hands of users, we connect them to their data in a truly agile way, maximizing value through shared insight which drives collaboration. By getting away from the silos of data management, we enable greater trust, governance and scale across the decision-making enterprise.”
