Using Data to Drive Innovation

This article was written by the IDG editorial team

There is no doubt that data is the catalyst for growth and innovation. However, it’s not just voluminous data that makes a mark, but rather a company’s ability to identify and collect the right data that ultimately drives their ability to spark innovation and seed new revenue growth.

According to a global survey by MIT Tech Review Insights in association with Pure Storage, 86% of respondents said a data foundation is central to strategic decision making. Eight-seven percent of those respondents said data is key to delivering better results for clients and customers as well as important for business growth.

While there is no questioning the significance of data, organizations are trying to find answers as to how to turn that data deluge into powerful insights that deliver real business benefits. Seventy-eight percent of the survey participants reported problems digesting, analyzing, and interpreting large volumes of data while 79% were still grappling with how to keep data relevant and of high quality. Moreover, 81% of responding companies said they were struggling with what processes to put in place to analyze more data at greater speeds.

In this week’s #IDGTechTalk, participants fessed up to their biggest big data struggles, but the discourse wasn’t all doom and gloom. The experts recommended a slew of best practices that can help IT organizations get ahead of the data management and analysis challenge. Here are highlights from the conversation:

Among the biggest hurdles to turning data into valuable business insights are 1) bias, due to an inadequate or incomplete data set; 2) staffing and retention of hard-to-find data scientists; and 3) trying to effectively gather data when there isn’t a formal plan.

Making sure data stays relevant is important because more data can end up being more of a problem if it’s not properly managed with context.

Lack of leadership and knowledge about what constitutes proper insights is another big stumbling block. Many companies don’t have internal experts with a basic understanding of statistics, which makes it difficult to tell a story with data if it’s not clear that it’s valid and correctly interpreted.

The onslaught of data can be overwhelming, underscoring the need for processes and proper governance to optimize its role. Be organized, take the time to determine what data is valuable to the business goals, document and understand the problems you are trying to solve, and by all means, ask the right questions. Know what data you have, and more importantly, what data you’re missing. Also be sure to address the time relevancy issue in order to ensure data is used to its greatest advantage.

Organizations also need to get better at data governance and data quality, including putting practices in place to clean and classify data so it’s tuned for optimal decision making. Part of proper governance means putting automation tools and coaching practices into place to ensure business users can maximize the data opportunity and that data becomes an integral part of the culture.

The usual suspects, including siloed, disparate data sources and lack of master data management domain expertise are among the most common barriers to successful data-driven innovation. More often, it comes down to a question of leadership — the need for top management in both IT and the business to champion the importance of data for customer experience and to promote investment in data science talent and toolsets.

There are an array of platforms and applications waiting in the wings to turn data into a strategic asset. Among the most prominent: Hadoop, an implementation of the Map Reduce algorithm; AI for statistical algorithms to help make sense of data; and data warehouses to store and manage data.

AI is an obvious choice to aid in filtering, segmenting, and collecting data, but there are issues around bias. Companies need to be careful to combine human and AI analytics to ensure the best results. There is also an opportunity to apply data to ease IT and security operations.

In the end, it’s not about collecting more data, it’s about processing and analyzing the data you need to get the best results. The idea is not to be a data hoarder, but rather ingest data so it can be quickly and accurately transformed into actionable insights.

How has data made a difference in your organization? Feel free to weigh in in the comment section below. And as always, please join us every Thursday at 12pm ET for the #IDGTECHtalk.

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