Infotech Lead America: 12 percent of enterprises surveyed use the full potential of Big Data, according to a survey by business analytics provider SAS and SourceMedia.
Respondents, who include 339 data management professionals, cited several reasons for not exploiting the valuable resource.
While 21 percent respondents do not know enough about big data, 15 percent admitted their ignorance about its benefits. 9 percent said they lack business support and an equal percentage of respondents said they lack data quality in existing systems.
“The 12 percent of organizations that are already planning around big data enjoy a significant competitive advantage,” said Todd Wright, global product marketing manager for SAS DataFlux Data Quality.
When respondents were asked whether their organizations would use external big data in 2014, 14 percent of respondents thought it was very likely, while 19 percent said it was not likely at all. There were concerns mainly around data quality and accuracy, accessing the right data, reconciling disparate data, lack of organizational view into data, timeliness, compliance, and security.
The survey results were undecided on who owns the data management strategy. While some respondents said midlevel IT personnel, some thought it should be owned by the CEO.
Most respondents said that detailed data analysis a priority for supporting business decisions, in addition to increased internal reporting and information access.
The number one expectation from data solutions was data visualizations and dashboards at 73 percent, followed by data profiling at 53 percent and SaaS at 44 percent.
Customer and product data topped the list of the types of data collected by organizations.
Of the types of customer data being collected to make decisions, business-to-consumer was considered to be the most important by 66 percent of the respondents, while end-customer data mattered to 59 percent of the respondents.
29 percent of the respondents felt that citizen data was important and 23 percent of them felt patient data is useful. The product data being collected for decision making were 62 percent on selling-side, 61 percent on buying-side and 40 percent on MRO side.
A recent Cisco survey revealed the same disconnect regarding Big Data, with only 28 percent of enterprises surveyed currently generating strategic value from their data.
