Business analytics held back by poor process and lack of data optimisation, report reveals

Companies could miss out on competitive edge in 2013.

  • Wednesday, 12th June 2013 Posted 11 years ago in by Phil Alsop

 

Computacenter, Europe’s preferred IT partner, today reveals that organisations may miss out on gaining business advantage because of failure to optimise stored data. According to research carried out by Inbox Insight and HDS, almost 60% of organisations find it hard to analyse information stored on their systems, showing that whilst companies may be able to cope with the volume and velocity of their data, their infrastructure is not sufficiently optimised to help them find and use information effectively.


“Company data today is like a woman’s handbag,” says Bill McGloin, Practice Leader for Data Optimisation, Computacenter. “It may hold a lot, but actually finding anything in it is practically impossible. As European markets grow ever leaner and more competitive, organisations which simply store data will find it harder to thrive. Using analytics to understand and exploit data will continue to increase in importance – but it’s clear from this report that organisations lack the process and infrastructure to make this a reality.”


According to the research, over half of organisations surveyed (52.5%) do not have processes in place to consolidate their data into a structure which allows degrees of Business Intelligence to be applied. This often results in failure to find trends in data, understand where new opportunities lie, or simply makes it harder for organisations to find data to comply with audit requirements. Over a third (37.6%) of organisations surveyed admitted to struggling with legislation, which carries the risk of stern fines from the Information Commissioner’s Office, for example.


“Although companies now have enough storage performance to cope with data, they may not have the data structure which would make business analytics possible,” continues McGloin. “This not only means that they will fail to exploit data to its fullest advantage, but costs may start to spiral out of control. Getting on the path to data analytics needs to be a key priority for 2013 if organisations are to effectively compete, innovate and bring new services to market. In what could potentially be a ‘lost decade’ of growth, companies which fail to prepare should prepare themselves to fail.”