Creating Value from Analytics: The Nine Levers of Business Success

IBM just released the results of a global study on how businesses can get the most value from Big Data and analytics. They found nine areas that are critical to creating value from analytics. You can download the entire study here.

IBM Institute for Business Value surveyed 900 IT and business executives from 70 countries from June through August 2013. The 50+ survey questions were designed to help translate concepts relating to generating value from analytics into actions.

The researchers identified nine levers that help organizations create value from data. They compared leaders (those who identified their organization as substantially outperforming their industry peers) with the rest of the sample. They found that the leaders (19% of the sample) implement the nine levers to a greater degree than the non-leaders. These nine levers are:

The researchers state that each of the nine levers have a different impact on the organization’s ability to deliver value from the data and analytics; that is, all nine levers distinguish Leaders from the rest but each Lever impacts value creation in different ways. Enable levers need to be in place before value can be seen through the Drive and Amplify levers. The nine levers are organized into three levels:

Next, the researchers offered a blueprint on how business leaders can translate the research findings into real changes for their own businesses. This operational blueprint consists of three areas: 1) Strategy, 2) Technology and 3) Organization.

Strategy is about the deliberateness with which the organization approaches analytics.;