A separate Booz Allen report uncovers the same reality: “The hard truth is that a key enabler to delivering on the biggest promise of data science is transforming organisational culture.”
Or as Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Centre for Digital Business, insists:
“[The] most enduring impact of predictive analytics … comes less from quantitatively improving the quality of prediction than from dramatically changing how organisations think about problems and opportunities.”
“Hard.” “Huge.” “Dramatic.” These are the words used to describe the kind of change required to truly become data-driven. Most companies simply aren’t up to the task.
Have no fear, though: It’s the boss’s fault.
If you ask business leaders to name their strategic challenges, “making fact-based business decisions based on data” tops the list (48% of respondents to the Forbes survey). But when you ask them how willing they are to trust that data, a less rational picture emerges.
A Fortune survey of 720 senior business leaders that revealed that 62% tend to trust their gut rather than data, and 61% indicated real-world insight tops hard analytics when making decisions.
In other words, the problem with truly embracing Big Data starts at the top.
A long way to go
This is why we’re seeing a boom in the adoption of such big data technologies as Hadoop, Spark, MongoDB, and Cassandra, even as returns on these investments sometimes stall. The problem is not the tools – it is the culture. And that culture starts with the C-Suite.
Big Data is big business for vendors of data infrastructure. As Mark Torr details, the Hadoop vendors are on a tear. This same observation holds true across the Big Data landscape. So companies are clearly spending on the Big Data dream.
But as erstwhile Wall Street analyst (and current Aerospike executive) Peter Goldmacher once declared, the big winners in Big Data won’t be the vendors. They will be the companies that leverage data “to create entirely new businesses or disrupt legacy businesses,” such as Uber or Facebook or any number of truly data-driven ventures.
To derive anywhere near that sort of value, enterprise CEOs will have to become as committed to acting on data as their developers and business analysts are about giving them access to that data through modern Big Data technologies. We have a long way to go.
Matt Asay, IDG News Service
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