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Business Intelligence: 'Data Black Spots' Cloud Decisions
“Every organization has to improve how its leaders make decisions. Managers must be able to turn information into insights, then convert insights into actions and be sure those actions produce positive outcomes.” That’s the conclusion in an August report published by Accenture. A majority of organizations want to be able to make and base their decisions on real-time information, but unfortunately, most companies lack the technology and skills to be able to manage and analyze the data that they collect.
A report from the UK research company Vanson Bourne finds that one of the ‘hang-ups’ is that many companies suffer from ‘data black spots’. These black spots represent certain types of information that is hard to get, chronically out of date, or simply just absent and not available. The result is that decisions must be made based on whatever information is currently available. Either that, or else the time required to make decisions gets significantly lengthened. Neither of these courses are optimal when needing to make good decisions.
The Vanson Bourne report found that only 29 percent of employees in the organization have access to decision-making data, and for those employees, only 40 percent of the company data is actually accessible. On top of that, access to real-time data is typically rare, and 17 percent report that they often need to wait for more than a week to receive the data which they request. Some of the inability to access data quickly is likely due to a lack of integration of the the many data sources and repositories that typically reside across an organization.
Access to real-time data can benefit all organizations and industry sectors, but the need to access real time data varies by sector. For example, only 28 percent of those in the private healthcare sector thought that real time data access was critical to them while nearly 50 percent of those in the utilities industry thought that it was critical.
Michael Corcoran, senior VP and chief marketing officer for Information Builders, said that “if companies want to increase their competitiveness, they need to improve access to data across all levels of the company.”
