Survey: Data Volume Does not Equal Value 

According to new research from Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, for many businesses “big data” has not yet brought about big results.

Bain spoke with CIOs and business leaders of 400 large organizations to determine just how much value was being driven from predictive analytics, and found that only four percent of them saw a link between analytics and better decision making.

Travis Pearson, Bain partner and co-author of the report, told CIO Journal that in the grand scheme of things, big data is still young, and many companies are still grappling with the question of how to best apply it.

But what Bain did find was the the companies who were most successful on this front possessed three key assets: a clear analytics strategy and leadership, quality data, and a team dedicated exclusively to finding value from it.

Overall only 36 percent of the surveyed CIOs said they had a dedicated data team, while 23 percent claimed a clear strategy and nineteen percent said they had access to high-quality, consistent data.

Although most of the organizations in question worked in financial services, which the firm estimates will account for $6.4 billion of big data spending by 2015, other sectors include software companies with $2.8 billion in projected spending, government with another $2.8 billion, communications and media with $1.2 billion, and energy with $800 million.

This is Bain’s latest report in a string of studies examining the use of analytics in enterprise settings. Already many companies have jumped on board the bandwagon in hopes of getting a leg up on their competitors, which was underscored by a recent finding by NewVantage Partners that 90 percent of 100 executives at large firms had a big data initiative already underway.

Meanwhile, the Bain report found that of the companies surveyed, across-the-board spending for analytics will rise 30 percent per year until 2020. IDC anticipates that the business analytics software market will grow 9.7 percent each year through 2017.

With that change, Pearson advises that these changes be paired with alterations to both business procedures and leadership, if necessary.

“Resolving to be data-driven requires fundamental change to teams and roles, business processes incentives, and even in leadership,” Pearson says.