Enterprises Lack a Mature Data Strategy -- 2nd Watch Survey
A new study found 70 percent of organizations want to make better use of their data but lack the resources, skills, and the vision to be successful.
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2nd Watch, a provider of cloud migration and managed cloud services, has completed a survey on data management and analytics in large enterprises. A key finding is that most organizations don’t have a mature data strategy -- only 26 percent of survey respondents said they have any data strategy at all and 70 percent don’t have what they consider to be a mature data strategy -- complicating their IT agility and ability to make timely, data-driven business decisions.
According to Gartner’s IT Roadmap for Data and Analytics, “Agile data and analytics capabilities are essential to build sense-and-respond capabilities and are leading organizations to unprecedented cycles of rapid innovation to meet the new requirements.” The analyst firm says there are multiple steps in the process to becoming a data-driven organization, beginning with having a vision and strategy to establishing an operating framework and governance to “continuous intelligence,” and refinement and progress.
Survey data collected by 2nd Watch supports this premise. Two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said data quality was the most important aspect of their data strategy, followed by security and privacy (61 percent) and integration (48 percent). Six in 10 respondents claimed to have an enterprisewide data catalog, reinforcing the notion that most organizations recognize the importance of comprehensive data management.
Why Aren’t Organizations Making Better Use of Data?
IT professionals responding to 2nd Watch’s survey were in agreement about the challenges they face in consolidating, analyzing, and using their data. For instance, fewer than half (42 percent) of respondents said they have the analytics expertise in-house to meet the business needs, and nearly four in 10 respondents (38 percent) said that self-service analytics requires IT support, impeding innovation and stretching already thin IT resources.
Data integration is another challenge: only 39 percent of respondents said all their data was available for reporting and analytics. The good news is that 47 percent of respondents said they’re using best-of-breed integration tools with bundled data quality, governance, and self-service provisioning. The bad news is that 49 percent are using tools included with their cloud data platform, and many of these tools lack the mature cataloging, data quality, governance, and privacy services that are essential to most large organizations.
Modern Tools, Technologies, and Processes to the Rescue
Legacy systems and IT architecture are impeding the ability of organizations to optimize their data, and IT is slow to respond to the analytics needs of end users due to complex data integration and management challenges. Nevertheless, progress is being made. A majority (57 percent) of survey respondents said they are using a cloud data warehouse, and 64 percent said their data is in the cloud. Slightly more than half (52 percent) have data science/machine learning projects in production, and 42 percent are testing some use cases.
In describing their data and analytics environments, 41 percent said moving to the cloud has allowed them to be more agile, and 44 percent said their cloud infrastructure and costs are under control.
The 2nd Watch 2021 Data Management and Analytics study includes responses from over 150 cloud-focused IT professionals in companies with at least 4,000 employees.
For details, visit www.2ndwatch.com.