Data analytics – expensive, complex but worth it
The importance today of being a data-driven business today is regularly hammered home in biz-tech media circles.
And behind that repetition is a lot of substance; as increasingly digitized organizations, we’re amassing more data than ever before – tapping into the insights it holds can inform and transform approaches inside and out of the business, be it learning about customer preferences or how to streamline our recruitment process, that ultimately can make us market leaders.
According to a new report by SQream, 59% of companies surveyed expect to see an increase of over 50% in their data volume in 2021. 60% of the surveyed companies already have over 500 TB of storage, meaning the expected increases will be enormous amounts of data.
The study found that 99% of management teams understand how critical data analytics is to make informed business decisions today. But the constant pressure to maximize the use of this ever-expanding wealth of data to derive ‘real-time insights’ and ‘data culture’ – and to avoid ‘dark data’ at all costs – likely induces a pang of anxiety among even hardened business leaders who find the task of being data-driven resource-intensive and mountainous.
While management teams want to prioritize data analytics, they generally don’t have the budget necessary to cover the costs. Only 13% of the companies surveyed were in a good financial position when it comes to supporting data analytics activities. Over half (55%) will not fare as well, as their budgets will cover less than 75% of their actual data analytics needs in 2021.
According to SQream, it remains to be seen if shifting priorities to focus on analyzing the treasure trove of data that companies are gathering will result in a matching shifting of budgets.
The expense comes with the need to invest in and effectively implement solutions and tools to analyze data, such as Hadoop, Spark, HANA, and Tableau. But even with sufficient technology in place, organizations need to recruit and commit talent to utilize these tools effectively and contribute to cheerleading and embedding a culture of data analytics within the business.
KPMGsuggests that organizations with a CDO are twice as likely to have a clear digital strategy. The ongoing education of the organization’s workforce is a fundamental part of such a strategy.
On top of the expense of data analytics tech and talent, 82% of companies shared a variety of challenges related to how long it takes to prep data, ingest data, run queries, and create analytic reports. Only 18% of surveyed companies claim to have no challenges when it comes to running data analytics.
Indeed, IBM found that even if you do invest in professionals such as data scientists, up to 80% of their time can be spent data cleaning, or making it ‘usable’ for analytics and other applications.
