IBM survey says executives in corner offices are hindering down the Big Data revolution
As the economy improves, organizations are shifting from a batten down the hatches mentality to looking to take advantage of the growth opportunities presented by the rebound. Big Data and analytics have become a hot topic in recent years, and more companies are realizing the revenue growth potential locked away in all that data. But in many cases, it's the C-suite holding things up. IBM Senior Management Consultant Cathy Reese sat down with Consulting to discuss the findings of IBM's fifth Big Data survey and about the culture shift emerging to harness the revenue generating power of data.
Consulting: What were some of the key findings in IBM's survey this year?
Reese: Business analytics are proving to be a big payoff for organizations. We found that 75 percent of organizations are now citing revenue generation and revenue growth as the chief source of value for applying analytics. I thought that was a very interesting trend that analytics is now going towards innovation and revenue growth and moving away from cost containment and operational focuses. This represents a significant jump from last year, we think it's because the economic times are changing and people are realizing they have a lot of data and they need to use that data and focus on revenue growth and innovations and new business models.
Consulting: What is driving this shift?
Reese: We're seeing an uptick in a lot of executive advocates and sponsorships in analytics projects. We have an increase of 10 percent in the number of CEOs and COOs being the CEO advocate for sponsorship, so we're up to 24 percent this year.
Consulting: Why the slow adoption from the C-suite?
Reese: It's an ever-changing area. A lot of people still have a culture where they base all their decisions on intuition as opposed to data. So we're really changing the culture to be more data-driven and then embedding that throughout the organization. We're also seeing in the leadership organizations that have excelled in analytics, the leaders are able to remove doubt and have created an environment where data is a priority. That's what we're looking for in the future. People are starting to push for data and to require it, and need analytics on the data. They want to make more right decisions, so that's what we find that people are starting to focus on. I think people are finally starting to come on board and realize if they make smart analytics investments they will generate revenue and value for their business.
Consulting: What industries have been the quickest to adopt? Which have been slowest?
Reese: I think more customer-facing industries like telecos and banking have been quicker to adopt, however I do see some of the newer industries with a wealth of data gathered are now realizing they need to do something with it. Moving towards more predictive maintenance and things they can do with the data they already have. Anything that's really customer facing where you'd rather have a single view of the customer are the industries that started more on analytics a few years ago and are still leading the pack, but other industries are starting to pick up speed and figure it out as well.
Consulting: What surprised you in the survey results?
Reese: Trust came up as a really important lever for analytics adoption. It's definitely an area where even the leadership needs to improve. We found 60 percent of our performers enjoyed strong levels of trust between individuals within an organization, but when you start talking about trust between business units and IT, that number drops significantly to around 44 percent. In the past, it's been more about lines of business going over requirements to IT, so very non-personal relationships. I think as more organizations start establishing centers of excellence and possibly co-locating their projects that trust builds up a little bit more and it becomes more personal.
Consulting: What is the future for analytics?
Reese: I think we're learning from the past and so we're trying to have a lot of our organizations work together and across lines of business to make sure they're really architecting for the future and establishing one enterprise strategy for analytics. We don't want to end up with all these siloed databases around the organization like in the past, we want to come up with one enterprise, we're doing that via the cloud and learning from the past and not just architecting for what's happening today but really for the future so it's always something that can be built upon.
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