What’s your organization’s most valuable asset? Your people, your leadership team, or your creativity perhaps? All of these undoubtedly have a huge influence on the future success of your business. But one, often under valued, asset is fast catching up as a critical element – your data.
When used correctly, data can unlock valuable insights to help anticipate demand, overcome operational challenges, and keep you one step ahead of the competition. But how many organizations can truly say they are a data-driven business? Very few, as it happens.
Maturity in analytics
A Gartner survey shows that only 9% of organizations worldwide feel they’ve reached a transformational level of maturity in data and analytics, despite this area being a number one investment priority for CIOs in recent years. And only 44% of respondents in North America and 30% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa think they’re getting any sort of differentiating or transformational benefit from their data analytics programs. So, what’s going wrong?
Barriers to effective analytics
There are three key barriers preventing organizations getting real value from their existing investments in data and analytics:
- Fragmentation: Data-driven decisions are highly fragmented. Many organizations are unaware of where exactly information resides as it’s often scattered in ‘data islands’ across a variety of disparate legacy systems. To compound matters, they have no easy way to combine it for analysis. Research commissioned by Exasol shows that fragmentation is holding back 55% of medium to large organizations from getting the full value from their data, while just 1% of businesses are fully data-centric.
- Performance: Legacy infrastructures result in inefficiencies and latency in the data pipeline. Since these systems weren’t built to handle the extreme demands of today’s compute and data-intensive workloads, they’re bottlenecks impacting the performance of analytics. As a result, reporting is often too slow for useful decision-making.
- Simplification: To tackle the huge data volumes within the limited constraints of the legacy IT, analytics systems have often simplified the data to speed up results. Aggregated reports, or reports based on a data extract, can be generated more quickly. While these insights can be used to give the board a good overview of the current business situation, they don’t provide a true understanding of the ins and outs of the organization or the markets it operates in.
What’s the answer?
To overcome these barriers and reach the highest levels of analytics maturity, you need to transform your analytics platform, so it can deliver insights in real-time, based on more complete and granular data.
Running on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, the Exasol Loading...in-memory database allows you to modernize your existing legacy infrastructure and bring together all your data. By doing so, you’ll be able to leapfrog the barriers to effective business analytics, delivering reports in seconds, improving productivity, and turning decision makers into ‘the smartest people in the room’.