CURRENT OVERVIEW

On July 17, 2012, Oracle Corporation released a research report based on a survey of 333 C-level executives from North American organizations across 11 industries. A presentation summarizing the findings can be found at the source link at the end of this report.

Neuralytix has reviewed these findings, and we find that Oracle’s report aligns with our assertions regarding the state of how the modern enterprise still lacks the people, process and technologies necessary to maximize value from data.

The report does point out the obvious, as does most other reports of this kind, that the amount of data that an enterprise for which it is responsible is growing. Most market research companies continue to remind its audiences that data is growing at exponential rates – something that has been the case for nearly 30 years!

Preparedness is the top concern for the surveyed companies – the report observes that 60% of the surveyed executives rated their companies “unprepared to leverage [their] data”

Of the greatest concern is that 93% of the surveyed executives “believe their organization islosing revenue as a result of not being able to fully leverage the information they collect.”

Neuralytix Perspective

So what does this all mean? When it is all said and done, the biggest message that can be derived from this report (and undoubtedly many others to come) is that enterprises want to engage in Big Data. It screams that the biggest challenge is not accessibility or availability of data; instead it is the ability to curate and compute data.

As Neuralytix continues to assert: “Big Data – if you’re not doing it, your competitors are™.”

The dirty secret regarding Big Data is that it is not as much about technology, as much as the value that the technology helps to create. The focus should not be about how much data there is; the type of data that is involved; or how many cores, processors and flash memory is available.

Enterprises need to focus on “what” to do with its data to create value. For most organizations, it means (for now), that they need to invest in technologies that will help organize and manage the data (i.e.

data curation). That is the reason why Hadoop has had such a great deal of attention.

Much of the challenge related to the “what to do with data” problem is that most typical business users do not have the skills to create the analysis necessary to support their decisions. These business users are highly reliant on business analysts with statistical and programming backgrounds.

This reliance creates latency in the time-to-value equation. It also introduces opportunities for data analysis to be skewed as the desired outcome needs to be interpreted by a third party.

So how do organizations address the problem. After all, if 94% of the surveyed believe they are losing revenue, this is a serious concern. This is a problem that should not be confined to the CIO’s office. Instead, this should be approached strategically, involving business, finance and technology leaders.

Technology leaders need to better articulate what data is available to encourage creativity among business users as to how the data can support strategic thinking and strategic decision making.

Source: Oracle – “From Overload to Impact: A Industry Scorecard on Big Data Business Challenges”