Nearly 100% of enterprises want to become more data-driven, but less than a third have accomplished that goal. A new survey sheds light on the reasons why.
Cynthia Harvey September 4, 2018
Nearly every enterprise wants to become more data-driven, but achieving that goal often requires overcoming some major obstacles.
In the NewVantage Partners Big Data Executive Survey 2018, a full 98.6% of respondents said that their firms are actively working on creating a data-driven culture. That was a significant increase from the 85.5% who said the same thing in 2017. However, enterprises are experiencing decreasing levels of success in working toward their goal. While 37.1% of those surveyed in 2017 said they had achieved a data-driven culture, only 32.4% reported success in 2018.
When asked what was preventing them from becoming more data-driven, 48.5% of executives said the problem was related to the people in the firm, while 32% blamed processes and 19.1% pointed the finger at technology.
A separate report from analytics vendor Devo sheds more light on that topic. In a survey of 400 IT and business decision makers at large enterprises in the U.S. and Europe, 97% of respondents said that their organizations had room for improvement when it comes to being data-driven. More disturbingly, 88% of respondents said that they couldn’t always access the data they needed to do their jobs.
Gartner Inc. research also finds that organizations are struggling with data. It said, “A worldwide survey of 196 organizations by Gartner showed that 91% of organizations have not yet reached a ‘transformational’ level of maturity in data and analytics, despite this area being a number one investment priority for CIOs in recent years.”
While business leaders want to become more data-driven, it’s not happening. The reasons why appear to be fairly complex, but the Devo survey turned up several issues that managers may be able to address. The following slides highlight 10 of these most common obstacles to becoming a data-driven enterprise.