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Got Big Data Problems? So Do Most Companies…

September 25, 2014 No Comments

Featured article by Drew Rockwell, CEO, Lavastorm Analytics

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Data analytics is not a new concept, but why are today’s businesses still grasping at how to use this information source to create more efficient and effective businesses?

A recent survey by Lavastorm Analytics of 495 analytics professionals and C-level executives looked at current analytic usage, trends and future initiatives of businesses when it comes to big data solutions. What we uncovered is that most businesses are not fully harnessing big data analytics benefits, even though more than half of those surveyed are rapidly growing their investment in analytics tools.

The survey showed that companies realize the benefits that data analytics can offer to overall business strategy and the importance of these tools in making better business decisions. However, while the good intent is there, analysts are not getting their hands on big data, since the need to understand big data tools and analytics is currently outside of their job description—leading to inefficient analytic supply chains as the data is compiled by IT or data scientists and then passed along. As a result, many companies are unable to turn analytic insights into action.

Elevating Big Data Out of the Data Scientist Silo

One of the more interesting findings was that business and data analysts are often in the dark when it comes to the work that their company is doing in the big data space. In fact,nearly 73 percent of analysts did not know what big data tools were being used, or were not currently using big data tools, compared to just 39 percent of data scientists.

Data scientists, who are generally in R&D or IT groups, are intimately involved in big data projects, but are keeping this information in a silo. As a result, big data projects are often treated as a science experiment and not a business-impacting capability. The best business results will be obtained when the business is heavily involved in the planning and analysis of big data projects. Gartner and other industry analyst firms have indicated that the vast majority (80 percent by some estimates) of Business Intelligence (BI)/analytic projects fail, and the lack of business involvement is a primary culprit.

Another fascinating finding in the analytics survey is the different methods data scientists and analysts use when analyzing data. Data scientists focus much more on building statistical models than data analysts (89 to 46 percent) and on research and development (69 to 48 percent). The survey also found that data scientists use statistical packaging and programming languages, while analysts use mostly Microsoft Excel, SQL and Microsoft Access. If more technical tools are needed to procure insights from the desired data, businesses are likely to call on data scientists for assistance. Business analysts need to be fluent with the current data analytics offerings in order to address the more complex business demands that they are now facing. Businesses that are not using these tools are falling further behind in their industry, since they do not have the deep insights of those who are investing more into their data.

Analytics Is Growing Despite Inefficient Analytic Supply Chains

Investment in analytics is increasing and will remain a top priority for CIOs in 2014 and beyond. However, while a majority of respondents in Lavastorm’s survey (64 percent) stated that their company is increasing investment in 2014, (with 21 percent indicating their company is increasing their investment significantly), organizations are still having difficulty gathering insights and making business improvements. This roadblock stems from the complex internal analytic supply chain, i.e. the multiple handoffs and specialists involved in pulling, sorting and analyzing data. There is no clear path for what businesses are supposed to do with an insight, and in some cases there can be miscommunication across different parts of the organization due to their lack of understanding or belief in the data insights.

Due to the innefficiencies, data quality is a legitimate concern as many businesses use multiple analytic tools, creating siloes of information that are not easily comparible. As such, 48 percent of respondents are working on data quality, a significant increase over the 27 percent that reported working on data quality last year. This is also why 35 percent of survey respondents who said they were increasing analytic investments in 2014 said their company is also investing in data management, because for today’s analysts, “manipulating/integrating data” is a major challenge. This is likely due to their dependency on general purpose analytic tools (Microsoft Excel, SQL and Microsoft Access), which are not designed for the complex data environments we have today.

For Business And Data Analysts, Their Biggest Challenge Is Turning Insights Into Action

Because of the inability to explain and show business impact from the data insights pulled from general purpose tools, along with inefficient supply chains, it is not surprising that “turning insights into action” is the main issue that data and business analysts are facing. Analytics is a complex operation, having as much to do with human interaction and communication capabilities as technology.

The organizational complexity is a major reason why organizations have shifted and continue to shift to a self-service approach. The self-service emergence started with business groups that wanted to take matters into their own hands and cut through a great deal of the organizational issues, such as IT’s minimal bandwidth to respond to BI requests, that were preventing them from answering key business questions. In fact, 30 percent of respondents stated that they were investing in self-service analytics tools for business users, further supporting the trend that those users will be taking on more complex analytic challenges themselves, such as integrating more diverse data sources, or collaborating with IT.

Overcoming these organizational challenges should improve analytic results and help companies put analytics into action. Companies that take a top-down data or analytic view of their operations and design a more streamlined analytic process will have a more responsive organization and better business insights.

For more details on big data trends, the full report can be accessed through http://ww2.lavastorm.com/Analytics-2014-Survey.html.

Drew Rockwell is the CEO of Lavastorm Analytics.

See infographic below for more info!

LS-Analytics-Survey-Infographic-070114-v6

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