The road to becoming a data-driven business

How ready is your organization for insight-enabled digital transformation?

We’ve all heard the sensationalist language used to describe exponential growth in electronic data, with frequent references to explosions, deluges, tsunamis and so on. This kind of terminology has clearly been used to highlight the significant and ongoing challenges in areas such as data storage and information management.

Related to this discussion has been the emergence of a common frustration. In the face of not just relentless growth, but also a proliferation of data sources and types, traditional processes and tools used to turn raw data into business insights and value have frequently become overwhelmed. Monthly, weekly and daily business intelligence output has not just been more difficult to produce, reports and analyses have increasingly ended up presenting views of the world that are out of date even before they are visible to decision-makers.

Over the past few years, though, advances in infrastructure, software and best practices, together with access to almost limitless compute and storage capacity in the cloud, have created the potential to totally change the game. Now it’s both cheaper and easier to manage even huge, diverse and fast-moving data sets. What’s really making a difference, however, is the ability to create rich and deep insights from such data that are continually refreshed and available to drive the business on a real-time, forward-looking basis.

With this in mind, the ‘data explosion’, while still challenging in many respects, now looks more like a significant opportunity, especially against the backdrop of digital transformation. The time has therefore come to switch
from a problem to an opportunity mindset and aspire to become what many refer to as a ‘data-driven business’.

In this report, we’ll explore how far a sample of 400 mainstream organizations taking part in a recent research study had progressed towards becoming genuinely data-driven. We’ll also examine the substantial benefits reported by a small group that had already achieved ‘data-driven’ status.

Download the Research Report to read more…

Dale Vile

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Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.