Published on the 01/10/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
Big data has captured the imagination of the enterprise – but it can still be tricky to identify how it’s being used, by whom and to what effect. New research however sheds more light on the issue…
A survey of 500 Australian executives has found that 48 percent believe their organisation understands big data, despite only 28 percent having a formal analytics strategy – pointing to a significant gap between idea and action.
Asked to identify the major benefits of a big data strategy, executives nominated customer and market insights (47 percent), cost saving (42 percent), and revenue growth (38 percent). And, while relatively few organisations have a formal strategy in place, 57 percent said their company was “thinking proactively” about the way it collected data and 56 percent said that there was a process for doing so.
In a separate study, Gartner also reinforced the relatively slow progress being made in turning big data ideas into action.
It found that although 73 percent of the organisations it surveyed planned to invest in big data technologies and services, just 13 percent had yet deployed such solutions. Many organisations report being stuck on the starting blocks because they haven’t been able to tie big data ambitions to business strategy. Pilots abound however.
Besides debunking the myth that significant progress had already been made with big data deployments Gartner tackled other false impressions. For example it blew out of the water any suggestion that because of the sheer volume of data today organisations did not have to be as vigilant about its quality and integrity. Wrong says Gartner – a poor quality dataset will have as big an impact in big data applications as in conventional applications.
Gartner also indicated that there was still significant value to be reaped from constructing data warehouses to support advanced analytics, and did not believe the emerging concept of the “data lake” was sufficiently mature to replace the more established and tested data warehouse approach.
The underlying technology associated with big data projects is however not always receiving the attention it ought.
The survey of 500 Australian executives, conducted by PureProfile on behalf of Rackspace Hosting, revealed that a significant number of big data projects are being conducted outside of the IT department with 36 percent running with little or no involvement from IT. Marketing, sales and finance are particularly prone to such rogue big data initiatives, making navigating technical and nuanced issues such as data warehouses versus data lakes particularly challenging.
