Turning information into Insight

Heureka has been discussing the collection of data for quite a while now. As mentioned before, organizations continue to mindlessly collect data without a real plan for organizing or gaining any intelligence from it. Take for example these statistics from a recent ZDNet article:

• 65% of organizations are unable to analyze all the data they collect
• 60-73% of all data goes unused from an analytics standpoint

Sources: Gemalto, Forrester

The article, “Avoid big data disaster: The secret of turning data into useful information,” suggests that even as organizations are collecting record amounts of information, they simply don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t make sense to collect information just for the sake of it. Unstructured data volume is growing at astronomical rates and in many cases has outstripped the corporate resources available to manage it. ZDNet details the challenge and provides expert commentary describing how to leverage collaboration and analytics to turn data into a competitive edge.

ZDNet includes expert commentary, broken down into three parts, about how meaningful insights can come out of this data that’s being wasted:

1. Convene experts to create a full picture of your customers

Particularly at larger companies, data is often siloed by departments. In an effort that’s referred to as data democratization, one big supermarket chain tells ZDNet it pulled together tech talent to form a new division, rather than having them stuck in a siloed department that handles only one business function.

The executive tells ZDNet that achieving this democratization requires making the data accessible to employees and giving them the tools to use it. At the same time, the company is limiting their reliance on human decision-making.

2. Create a culture that emphasizes data

Another executive tells ZDNet that a data-driven approach should extend throughout the organization, and will lead to better decision-making overall. In fact, companies such as Tableau are encouraging companies to build data-driven organizations as well with tools such as Blueprint.

Surveys show there’s much improvement to be made in this regard:

• 69% of C-suite executives acknowledge they have not created an organization driven by data

Source: NewVantage Partners

3. Embrace business intelligence (BI) and analytics

The last executive interviewed by ZDNet suggests that organizations need to have useful ways of presenting data to employees. As opposed to having unmanageable piles of data, they should have engaging visualizations. Consider this statistic:

87% of organizations have low BI and analytics maturity

Source: Gartner

Conclusion

All of these recommendations are on point with what we see on a daily basis at Heureka. Thankfully, we offer solutions to these data-related problems, and can easily export data to common BI tools to share data intelligence.

The growth of unstructured data is an ongoing challenge for organizations everywhere. With corporate data growing by 63% per year, organizations should have policies in place to manage it all—and it begins with understanding the life cycle of data, from discovery to remediation.

The good news is that many organizations are at least acknowledging the issue: according to a PwC survey, 86% of executives agree with the statement, “We are in a race with competitors to extract value from data.” To help your own organization turn information into insights and gain a competitive edge, we invite you to learn about Heureka’s in-place indexing and classification. Click here for the full DOMO report.