We can already establish that data is valuable to organisations. But all the data that can be stored in data warehouses will come to naught if the right questions (and the right parameters via which one can get the nearest to accurate answers), are not applied.
So, the ability to ask better questions of data is central to driving better business outcomes, and this is reflected in findings by an Economist Intelligence Unit report sponsored by Oracle and Intel titled, “In search of insight and foresight: Getting more out of big data.”
The global EIU survey found that a vast majority of the 373 surveyed senior executives agree that asking better questions of data has already improved their organisation’s performance and will continue to lift it in the coming years.
That doesn’t mean that companies suddenly have a magic crystal ball that will predict the future. Many are still struggling to use data to gain insight into their businesses- and foresight into how best to move forward.
There were also unexpected results, according to Oracle’s Program Director of Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle APAC. “We were even finding that companies were struggling with non-big data,” he said.
Lessons from successful firms reveal that achieving insight and foresight requires crafting savvy questions that test smart hypotheses.
Other key findings include :
Focusing on a business outcome is crucial, yet a struggle for most companies. Defining, agreeing on and gearing data analyses towards clear, specific and relevant business objectives is difficult for many companies and a critical obstacle to translating data into insights, results and competitive advantage. Executives overwhelmingly consider predictions (70%) the most critical type of data insight for C-level decisions, followed by insights into trends (43%).
The main challenges are people-related. Though survey respondents are most frustrated by poor data quality and reliability (51%) and a lack of effective systems for data gathering and analysis (43%), experts say that people-related obstacles are often more formidable than technological ones. Bringing in people with the right skills and instilling the right organisational culture around data are where many companies fall short.
Top performers gain competitive advantage from data. Companies that outperform in profitability do everything with big data better. They stay focused on key business objectives, ensure close alignment between data efforts and business strategy, foster a culture of collaboration and experimentation, and invest in data capabilities with patience and commitment. This pays off; executives at outperforming firms are significantly more likely than their less-successful peers to say that better questions have improved performance (84% vs 68%) and will continue to in the next three years (93% vs 82%).
Looking in the rear view mirror
“Insight and foresight are equally important,” said Shridar. Big data and deriving information from it, for a long time has been the domain of IT, however. “But IT would not know how to find the data, how to model it and how to present it in a format that highlights KPIs.”
Being able to give these business users (power users) the ability to ask questions directly of the data, is sorely lacking.
‘The capability to understand correlations and give business users ability to look at them; that’s missing from traditional historical analytics.”
Foresight, or being able to tell the impact of a certain decision, is one of the valuable information that can be massaged out of big data. “Predictive analytics applied to big data sets like machine data or social media, and when harnessed by end users through mobility, and combined with diagnostic applications, is very powerful,” Shridar also opined.
