Enterprises everywhere are rushing to embrace automation and AI to improve existing business processes and innovate. But they’re learning that if APIs are the glue they use to build their systems, data is the fuel that drives these efforts forward.
According to data management provider Actian, however, enterprises are experiencing significant challenges when it comes to obtaining fresh data, effectively wrestling with the complexity of data and getting to the point of driving innovative initiatives.
The Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot surveyed 300 IT decision-makers and professionals in businesses with 259 or more employees. Ninety-four percent of respondents said it’s important for them to have a system in place that makes certain users keep getting data, yet 58% of respondents admitted it is only somewhat likely, or not likely, they are actually getting fresh data to their users. So much for smart, real-time decision making.
That could explain why just 34% of respondents who said they are using data for decision-making are using it to push innovation forward, instead, the majority are using it for traditional business operations and reporting.
“Business as usual operations keep enterprises running from day-to-day, but limiting data to operational reporting tasks means missing a key piece of the data puzzle–new insights that lead to awareness of products, markets, consumer trends, strategy and more,” said Actian in a statement.
The costs of data management are also taking their toll. The survey found 84% of enterprises would deploy more data if they could do so more cost-effectively.
Those costs could be driven, in part, by the complexity created with data being stored within application siloes and across multiple cloud environments.
“Over 50% of these businesses say data complexity issues, due to siloed applications, are a top barrier to entry for accessing data and gaining effective real-time insights,” said Actian.
Actian concludes, unsurprisingly, that enterprises must get to the point that they can exploit their data in real-time and better manage data across cloud platforms.
“Slower decision-making is only one consequence of having to wait for data to become available for analysis,” said Jack Mardack, vice president at Actian. “There are exciting new analytics use cases, like customer-360 and hyper-personalized real-time offers, that simply don’t work with stale data”
“Enterprises are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for business-as-usual reporting that it leaves no viable bandwidth for generating new insights. This requires that enterprises provide not only the necessary data management infrastructure to make data from all their sources available to analytics discovery, but also that they invest in and empower data teams that can pursue new insights from new data spaces,” stated Actian.
