Companies use data. This resounding truism is of course not news in and of itself, this has always been the case; even before the dawn of computers, we know that bookkeepers used ledgers and files to record business transactions.
Ever since commercial business has had access to IT backbone power from mainframe and personal computers (an era that started somewhere between the 1950s and 1960s), companies have been using data to store, backup and scrutinize business operations.
But computers are not just for tape backup procedures anymore, today we use data in a huge variety of different ways for analytics, business decision making and as an ingestion stream to build our new approach to Intelligence. Given our progress thus far then, are we reaching a point of information management penetration where data intelligence maturity is directly correlated to higher levels of commercial business success?
Data intelligence company Collibra has a vested interest in answering that question with a resounding yes and so, logically, has invested its press-facing expenditure in research aligned to attempt to validate the point. Given that surveys are (arguably) never undertaken (and certainly not publicised even when independent) if they fail to deliver the payload that the sponsoring organisation desires, should we give any credence to Collibra’s latest analysis in this space carried out with IDC?
Collibra’s IDC study does indeed ‘find’ (let’s say suggest) that data intelligence is crucial to making informed business decisions and driving better business outcomes. But data intelligence company surveys that tell us that data intelligence is important are not worth much. But what is (arguably) more interesting is the suggestion that nearly two-thirds of respondents say that they have challenges with ‘identifying & and controlling’ data sources in their organization.
If we live in a world where almost no companies (5% in this study) say that they have zero organizational data governance challenges, then we have to stop and ask what is happening in all the other firms – do they grab a bit of data ingestion, data orchestration, data deduplication and data management on a sort of piecemeal basis now and again? Is it a bit like staff bonding days and end-of-year parties i.e. nice to have, but not life-changing if they get missed?
The study in question here says that gathering data intelligence is important, but how organizations activate that intelligence is what sets them apart. Organizations with higher levels of maturity across data intelligence management, data cataloging, data governance, data quality are likely to realize higher business benefits and performance versus peers.
The most mature organizations achieve three times the business benefits of their peers, with the most significant improvements across their ability to innovate, adhere to regulatory compliance requirements and reduce their time to market for new products and services. These organisations also see an increase in trust around data thanks to improvements in data quality, leading to the faster delivery of actionable insights to accelerate decision-making.
The study also suggests that the most data-culture-mature organizations have clearly defined roles and responsibilities for data and analytics, take a holistic approach to data intelligence, always expect intelligence about data to be available when making data-driven decisions, measure results and have four times the adoption compared with less mature organizations.
Data culture is critically important for mature organizations and those organizations that make data culture a priority across the organization are better able to drive data-driven decisions and outcomes.
The study found that 86% of respondents had a dedicated team responsible for data culture that was focused on building data literacy. The least mature organizations were six times more likely to have no dedicated team responsible for data culture.
