08 December 2015
Bureaucracy around access to Big Data is preventing many companies from gaining insights that lead to great ideas.
A lack of insight gained from analysing Big Data is costing businesses up to £20m a year in lost opportunities, says Pure Storage.
In a recently published study, it says more than half of businesses have missed opportunities they didn’t see coming because they lacked accurate information at a time when they really needed it.
According to the storage specialist, European companies face a dilemma: 78 per cent of them believe they could boost their performance by at least 21 per cent if they could access insights faster.
But just over half said they’d lost an opportunity that they’d not seen until it had already gone. Thirty one per cent had it happen more than once a year, while 19 per cent saw it happen a few times a week.
Pure Storage says this equates to a significant loss – up to £2 million a year in lost revenue per company for those with sales between £100m and £500m, and considerably more for those earning more than £1 billion: an estimated £20 million per company per year.
Almost three-quarters of companies admitted that they collect data but never use it. Forty eight per cent said this is because data processing is too time consuming, while for 19 per cent it is too expensive to process.
James Petter, VP EMEA, Pure Storage says the reason for these trends is because it is now cheaper for businesses to retain the data they are collecting rather than destroy them. “So the volume of data a business holds is growing rapidly. But at the same time, it is complicated and costly to access usable information fast enough to make a difference.”
Fifty six per cent of companies surveyed said bureaucracy around access to information is preventing them from using their data to find those unique pieces of insight that lead to great ideas.
“Data ownership is no longer just the remit of the CIO, the democratisation of insight across businesses enables them to disrupt the competition,” says Petter. “Companies often have access to the same information. It’s the speed and simplicity of tools with which they can harness it into actionable insights that disrupts their competitors.”
He adds that as companies increasingly gather more granular data on what they do, the potential to gain understanding and plan accordingly is not just a profitable undertaking – it is a necessity.
“Transformation is being forced on organisations at an ever-increasing pace. They must adapt to new ways of doing business, new markets and new practices – or die,” warns Petter.
