Top 3 Big Data Challenges & Opportunities Uncovered in Economist Intelligence Unit Research

[RickS]

Too much relevant and important data – including new sources of Big Data used for Strategic Analytics – remains out of reach from those who can turn it into value.  That’s one of the key findings in recent Economist Intelligence Unit research sponsored by Alteryx and summarized in Big data and the Democratisation of Decisions. 

The research that fed this report was a global survey of business leaders across industries on the issues related to decision makers’ access to and analysis of Big Data. 

It identifies three key findings related to getting value out of Big Data:

1. Not enough people in the organization have access to Big Data
   • 77% of executives said more employees need access to Big Data
   • 45% of them did not feel they had enough Big Data in the last major business decision they made; 76% of those agree that adding more sources of data to their analysis would have helped ensure a more positive decision and business outcome
   • 53% anticipate increased investment in expanding Big Data decision capabilities to more employees
2. Big Data analytics drive new market opportunities and customer retention
   • When asked what types of business decisions would most benefit from more inclusion of Big Data 67% said “market opportunity and segmentation” and 55% answered customer retention
   • If Big Data analysis were expanded to more decision making employees 45% said their most important outcome would be “identifying business opportunities that were not previously apparent” and 37% answered “identifying opportunities and exploiting them faster”
   • The top four job functions listed as having the greatest potential benefit from increased access to Big Data analytics were:  1) Customer Service 2) Marketing  3) Strategy and Business Development and 4) General Management
3. Big Data by itself isn’t enough – it’s much more valuable when analyzed in the context of other relevant market and customer data
   • More than half of respondents wanted to look at Big Data in the context of other relevant market and customer data, with the top three answers being Competitive Intelligence (66%) , Customer Segment Data (65%), and Market Condition Models & Data (54%)
   • Other answers included Internal Customer Data (39%) and Third Party Market Data (37%)

At Alteryx, we have been talking for some time about the need to Humanize Big Data by (1) providing better Big Data access to line of business executives through analytic apps; (2) enabling them to combine it with other relevant data; and (3) easily perform sophisticated analytics (such as predictive & spatial).  This report reinforces the need for businesses to do all three of these things in order to better convert Big Data into business value.  Download the complete report here.

Rick Schultz

SVP of Marketing
Alteryx