Confusion over Big Data strategies and tools leaves organisations scrambling for insight

Half of European organisations believe they are not deriving enough value from the data they have at their disposal, despite almost three quarters claiming to have a data strategy in place. This points to a fundamental lack of understanding of what constitutes a good data strategy and adequate data integration tools, according to Nejde Manuelian, Director of EMEA Operations at Syncsort.

71 per cent of organisations questioned as part of Syncsort’s EMEA Big Data and Hadoop Trends survey said they have a data strategy. More than a third (37 per cent) believe that their strategy is good and that they have the right tools to handle the data they gather and generate. In spite of this, 48 per cent are concerned that they do not extract sufficient value from that data.

This contradiction is evidence of organisations’ failure to update their tools to account for the ever-expanding volume of data they have to deal with, says Manuelian: “Deriving the greatest possible value from data is becoming increasingly critical for organisations looking to build and maintain commercial and competitive advantage. Whether you are a bank or mobile phone company looking to reduce churn, a supermarket trying to offer the best targeted promotions, or simply wanting to understand and improve the efficiency of your own internal business processes, you need to be wringing every drop of insight out of your data to get ahead,” he said.

“But as more and more data is collected and generated on every aspect of business processes and customer behaviour, traditional data integration tools are creaking under the pressure. If current strategies are not delivering the insight and value required to make sufficiently informed business decisions, organisations will have to look beyond what they know, to innovative solutions and platforms such as Hadoop,” Manuelian continued.
Confusion is even more marked among large organisations (those with at least 5,000 employees): 57 per cent perceive their data strategy and tools to be good, but more than half (53 per cent) still feel they don’t maximise the value of their data. “Larger organisations typically have more of everything – more suppliers, more customers, and, consequentially, a lot more data to sift through to get a clear understanding of their business,” said Manuelian.

“The greater the challenge of sorting the wheat from the chaff, the more important it becomes for organisations of any size to identify the correct tools for their needs and put an effective strategy in place,” he concluded.