Reaching the data gold standard: dream or reality?
On the face of it, the concept of businesses bringing structured and unstructured data together through technology to surface new insights about themselves, their products and their customers sounds simple.
But this year’s Harvey Nash Group Digital leadership report – the world’s largest and longest-running survey of senior technology decision-makers – shows that reaching this data gold standard remains tantalisingly difficult for organisations to pull off.
The research shows that only around a quarter of technology leaders rate their organisation as highly effective in using data to generate more revenue or to inform their product or service offering.
The picture is slightly better for large organisations – those with tech budgets of $250m or more – with 38% rating themselves as very effective in using data to generate revenue and 39% to inform their product or service. It may be the case that larger organisations simply have more data to play with, but it’s also the case that they are prepared to invest, and they are seeing more returns as a result.
However, even among those larger companies, relatively few are making the jump to large-scale implementations of big data. Less than a quarter (23%) of digital leaders say their organisation has implemented big data on a large scale, with a third (34%) having introduced it in small pockets.
There remains a preference to dip the corporate toe in the water through pilots and proof of concepts in emerging technologies, opting to learn fast and fail fast rather than commit to large initiatives. This is even more pronounced with other emerging technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).
If this sounds somewhat disappointing, there are grounds for encouragement. The proportion of technology leaders rating themselves “digitally excellent” has risen significantly in the past 12 months – from 30% a year ago to 41% now. There’s no doubt that the pandemic has forced businesses to digitally upgrade at pace. And it won’t stop here. Digital leaders are reporting the highest ever level of optimism for increasing tech budgets and headcount for the coming year. Crucially too – and as we regularly remind our customers – it doesn’t all have to happen at once. This is a journey. The path to reaching the data gold standard is a long one, not a short sprint. The key is to create an incremental roadmap of stages along the journey: gradual, affordable technical investments within a manageable change programme that produce visible impacts and enable the business to achieve specific goals. You don’t need to look far to see the prevalence of data ingestion and cleaning tools in the market, but tooling alone isn’t enough. To make it meaningful, you need to understand which datasets are important and why.
