Businesses globally are still unable to properly leverage their data, according to a study by Snowflake, the Data Cloud company.
According to the firm’s report, only six percent of businesses globally use, access, and share data in a way that grants them all the business benefits provided by a robust data strategy.
It also highlighted that only 38 percent of businesses are in a position to extract value from their data and use it to inform the decisions they make, and just 55 percent say that data sharing can happen freely in their organisation.
At the helm of the data economy are ‘Data Economy Leaders’, according to Snowflake. They are characterised by their ability fully unlock the power of their organisations data and identified that 77 percent of these businesses experienced annual revenue growth over the past three years.
Meanwhile, only 36 percent of ‘Laggards’ – the lowest-performing businesses surveyed – can say the same. Moreover, 60 percent of Leaders saw their market share grow over this period, compared to only 31 percent of Laggards.
“Successful organisations will attain the business advantage that comes from access to data, data services, solutions, and collaboration – which can only be found in the Data Economy”, said Jennifer Belisssent, Principal Data Strategist at Snowflake.
“These organisations are capitalising on data platforms in the cloud. They have strong, data-literate leadership that encourages an enterprise-wide approach to data innovation and have established processes that make their data mutually available. As a result, these forward-thinking organisations are using all that the Data Economy offers to solve the most complex business problems, improve customer experiences and crackdown on fraud.”
The study further revealed that less than half (42 percent) of organisations surveyed reported that they use data to identify risk and prevent fraud within their business. The most common use for how data is used – demonstrating a growing trend for businesses to use data in a preventative way, to protect themselves and their customers. 41 percent of organisations use data strategically to launch new revenue streams or pricing models and 40 percent do so to reveal new market opportunities.
The report’s analysis of the Data Economy Leaders revealed several other areas in which these organisations considerably outperform their peers, with their strengths exhibited across three main pillars: people, process and technology.
In terms of people, Snowflake highlighted that strong leadership is essential if a business is to thrive in the Data Economy. For almost two-thirds (63 percent) of Data Economy Leaders, there is a C-level mandate to become data forward.
As for processes, the report revealed that leaders are better at aligning data objectives across teams, with 62 percent having a data or analytics centre of excellence that coordinates data policies, and 54 percent enabling users to access all available data through a single system or application.
Lastly, the study noted that twice as many Leaders as Laggards (50 percent vs. 24 percent) describe the data storage and management technologies they use as ‘easily scalable and elastic’. Leaders draw upon a greater volume of data, in different forms, while breaking down silos and collaborating with both internal and external partners.
