UK businesses taking up to a fortnight to analyse data

Over half (53%) of senior decision-makers within UK businesses say their organisation is wasting time planning data collection resulting in them often being unable to make quick decisions to drive their business forward in rapidly evolving landscapes, research from InterSystems, a global leader in database management platforms, has found.

The survey of senior decision-makers also revealed that throughout the data collection process 53% of organisations say they spend time deciding how best to analyse and interpret the collected data, while 52% plan an approach and methods for data collection.

Saurav Gupta, technical engineer, InterSystems, said, “While businesses are making good use of their data, including customer records (54%), financial reports (49%) and sales figures (49%), they are wasting time planning how to collect it and analysis of this data, once collected, takes too long. Planning how to use data may seem beneficial, however, with the majority of businesses taking up to two weeks to analyse data, it’s likely to be outdated.”

According to the research, 41% of respondents state that the data generated by their organisation is fed back into the business on a weekly basis. While this indicates that information is being shared between departments, challenges in accessing this data is slowing down the process and more real-time access would be beneficial.

“Businesses are generating a wealth of data to get to know their customer better (93%), for the decision-making process (91%), for identifying business challenges and needs (89%), and for trend prediction (83%). By being able to access and analyse this information quicker, it will be possible for businesses to vastly improve their operations,” commented Gupta.

Despite 75% of organisations managing their data centrally, there is a clear challenge in accessing this data quickly which could be overcome by the use of tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyse and gain insight from their data in real-time. Almost three-quarters (73%) of senior decision-makers are comfortable with the use of AI in their business, while 64% said that they think AI will have a positive impact on their job in the future. Therefore, they must begin look to AI and ML for support in order to derive quicker insights and deliver more value to customers.

“Data is clearly extremely valuable to businesses but at the moment there is too much of a delay between data being collected and insights gained from it being implemented. The democratisation of infrastructure with the use of AI, ML and cloud technologies will allow businesses to deliver real-time outcomes at scale,” added Gupta. “The speed and scale offered by data management technologies that use AI and ML mean businesses can run real-time machine learning algorithms and try to determine the best outcome for their customer.”