Published on the 25/08/2016 | Written by Beverley Head

A quarter of A/NZ businesses gather data but don’t analyse it…

A survey of Australian and New Zealand business executives has revealed that a full quarter of organisations collect data, but don’t analyse it. If data really is the new oil, it seems a shocking waste of resources.

In fact only 39 percent of respondents to the survey, commissioned by data warehousing and analytics company Teradata, said that they were using real time analytics, and an even scanter 15 percent said that they considered themselves “data centric” in that they constantly analysed data in real time to aid decision making. It’s an issue which has been called out by a data scientist at one of New Zealand’s top SAP partners, too. Andrew Peterson said recently that there is too much emphasis on ‘data’ and not enough on ‘analytics’.

At the same time there has been a shift in “ownership” of enterprise data projects.

In 2015 a survey of Australian and New Zealand business executives revealed that around a third of all data analytics projects were “owned” by the line of business. That has this year plunged to just 3 per cent with the CIO and IT holding the budget reins in 43 percent of cases, and CFO and finance in 24 percent.

Whoever holds the analytics purse, it’s not getting bigger according to survey respondents. Asked if there were plans to spend more in the area in the coming year, 37 percent of respondents said no. Last year it was 30 percent.

The findings are somewhat at odds with Gartner’s forecast which predicts that the Australian business intelligence and analytics market will grow 9.1 percent this year to $A700 million while New Zealand is predicted to enjoy 8.1 percent growth and reach $NZ92.3 million. ANZ CIOs also ranked business intelligence and analytics as their top priority this year.

What Gartner revealed was a shift away from IT led reporting to self-service analytics within the business.

Whether Teradata is the right company for that has already been questioned in some quarters, despite the company’s continued prowess in Gartner’s magic quadrant. Earlier this week Robert Wilson, general manager technology, strategy and architecture at Westpac bemoaned the fact that a lot of the bank’s data was still “Trapped in large and expensive Teradata machines” which he said was great for regulatory inquiries, “But really crap for anything useful around what the customer wants to do next.”

And according to Teradata, customer service remains the top priority for organisations which are leveraging their data stores.

Another issue that the Teradata report reveals is the lack of breadth in terms of data available to the enterprise. The report indicates that 91 percent of data available for analysis comes from existing internal systems. Just 1 percent comes from Internet of Things devices, 3 percent from online sources, and 5 percent of third parties.

This suggests that at present much of the effort seems to be directed to internal navel gazing efforts rather than a more holistic analysis of all data available. It also suggests that the IoT and big data are firmly in the hype, rather than practical application, phase.