How Complexities—and a Lack of Data Access—Create Analytics Issues

While company leaders recognize the immense potential to gain a competitive edge via analytics, experiences with these solutions result in “too many questions and not enough answers,” according to a recent survey from Teradata. The resulting report’s title asks the question, “Is Analytics Being Used for Actionable Insight?” and the answer appears to be—for now—“not nearly enough.” Most survey respondents feel that analytics technologies are too complex. What’s more, too few employees have access to the data they need to make good business decisions every day. A total of 260 global IT and business decision-makers took part in the research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne. This slide show presents survey highlights, with charts provided courtesy of Teradata.

More than four of five respondents said they’d like for analytics to become more pervasive within their organization. But 46 percent said that analytics isn’t driving business forward because “there are too many questions and not enough answers.”

About three quarters of survey respondents said their organization’s analytics tech is, at the very least, “somewhat” complex. Fifty-three percent even said their organization is “overburdened” by the complexity of analytics.

On average, respondents anticipate that their analytics spend will increase by 11 percent over the next 12 months and by 17 percent within three years. Over the next five years, respondents predict that their spending on analytics will increase by an average of 21 percent.

Nearly three of five respondents said they’re using analytics to more efficiently run business operations. Fifty-five percent said they’re using analytics to optimize their product/service range.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said analytics investment is crucial in attempting to get ahead of the competition. And, while two-thirds said it has put their organization ahead of the competition, only 18 percent said it has put their company “significantly” ahead of the competition.

More than two-thirds of respondents said, at best, only one-half of employees at their company has access to the data they need to make daily decisions. Only 11 percent said they themselves have access to all of the data they need to do their jobs effectively.

Among respondents who said they need more access to company data to do their jobs effectively, 41 percent said they “cannot get the full picture” without this access. Thirty-six percent of these respondents said this issue prevents them from getting real-time insights/results.

One-half of respondents said their analytics investment isn’t giving their organization the ROI it expects. About one-third said they aren’t seeing the full value of their analytics investment in the case of risk mitigation/fraud/compliance efforts, as well as financial transformation initiatives.

Among respondents who indicate that their use of analytics isn’t helping them achieve all of their business objectives, 34 percent said this is because their data resides on too many different platforms that don’t work. The slow adoption of new analytics technologies was cited as a factor by 34 percent of these respondents as well.

IT decision-makers taking part in the survey indicated that, on average, they spend 62 percent of their data/analytics time preparing and integrating data. But they only spend about 36 percent of their time actually using analytics-produced data for intelligence-related purposes.