Big Data/BI Initiatives Struggle to Support Core Business Needs

Intro: While many organizations are increasing efficiencies and reducing costs through big data-enabled business intelligence (BI) initiatives, relative few are deriving “substantial” value from these efforts, according to a recent survey from Kyvos Insights. The resulting “BI on Big Data Adoption” report indicates that companies are investing in big data infrastructure to expand data sources while addressing scale-related issues. But only a minority of survey respondents are satisfied with their big data infrastructure’s performance. An estimated 300 IT leaders and managers, C-suite executives and other senior-level professionals took part in the research. The following slide show presents selected report findings, with charts provided courtesy of Kyvos Insights.

Kyvos Insights reports that 54 percent of survey respondents indicate that their organization deploys big data infrastructure to incorporate new data sources. Saddled with growing data volume, one-half do so to address “scale-out” issues.

Seven of 10 organizations use big data infrastructure to support business intelligence (BI). Nearly three of five do so to support advanced analytics.

Only 25 percent of respondents said their company is deriving “substantial” value from BI initiatives that use big data, and only 4 percent said BI is at the core of their organization’s business processes. Seven of 10 said their business was either deriving “minimum” value or that it was “too early to tell.”

About two of five respondents are satisfied with the performance and maintainability of their big data infrastructure, compared with 12 percent who are not satisfied. Nearly one-half said it was “too early to tell” whether the performance and maintainability will meet expectations.

Two of five respondents said their BI infrastructure “measures up” in terms of response time for large amounts of data and the finest granularity. Less than one-quarter said their BI infrastructure is falling short here.

When asked what they seek from big data-focused BI initiatives, 54 percent of respondents cited real-time analytics. One-half are looking for predictive analytics, and 30 percent would like better “exploration and experimentation” capabilities.

Other top requirements for data-focused BI initiatives include the ability to “scale out for massive amounts of data” along with response speed, as cited by 50 percent of respondents. Organizations would also benefit from the capability to connect to existing BI tools (as cited by 43 percent of respondents) and support unstructured and semi-structured data (42 percent).

The biggest value returns from big data-connected BI initiatives are related to operational efficiency, as cited by 54 percent of respondents. The second would be cost reductions, as cited by 43 percent.

A lack of available skill sets poses the greatest challenge for implementing big data-driven BI projects, as cited by 52 percent of respondents. Governance-related tasks create the second biggest challenge, as cited by 45 percent.

As with many tech functions, you can expect a big data BI migration from on-premises in the immediate future: The findings reveal that 54 percent of organizations plan to move their big data infrastructure to the cloud within the next three years.