Almost three-quarters of UK IT leaders are struggling to get full value from their ‘data brain’, according to a new study by Google Cloud consultancy, AppsBroker & CTS.
The survey of 150 UK IT leaders revealed that almost all (91%) of the respondents have a specific mandate from their board or executive team to make their organisations more data-driven and data-centric.
However, businesses are using far less than half (39%) of their data brain, and almost 70% admit to hoarding data in data lakes and only using a small portion of it.
According to the study, less than half (46%) of IT projects that rely on data run on time, within budget, and to the intended scope – while at the same time over three quarters say that the complexity of their data architecture is increasing, 85% say the costs are increasing every year, and nearly 70% say it is increasingly difficult to manage.
The hurdles faced by 88% of the respondents derive from IT and data complexity, legacy systems, and a lack of skills and resources.
The survey shows that almost 90% IT leaders are keen to empower ‘data citizens’ – employees with access to the data – to overcome the data skills gap, but even they themselves (81%) lack the skills and knowledge to make this happen.
It’s evident from the survey that businesses and it’s IT leaders are battling with how to handle their data effectively – almost 40% confirm to have overspent or underspent on projects, a similar number are likely to have made decisions based on inaccurate data and just over a third (36%) of respondents have made inaccurate forecasts (although it may be higher).
On top of this, around a third have suffered customer complaints, delayed product or service launches (31%), and over a quarter (27%) have missed reporting deadlines, or missed revenue opportunities (25%).
“Leaders are using data for big business-defining decisions, so they’d better be confident that information is right,” said Matt Penton, head of data and analytics at Appsbroker & CTS. “Reporting bad numbers can have very serious and public repercussions, and customer complaints can quickly lead to churn.”
“Unless you’re selling grated unicorn horns, customers can and will go elsewhere.”