How Analytics Can Create More Value for the Enterprise

IT and digital leaders agree that data analytics is important for their organizations to stay competitive. However, different roles struggle with different challenges to make it work. This has resulted in a significant gap between enterprises’ business priorities and performance. That’s according to the latest findings from Alteryx’s research report titled, “Toward Analytics Automation in Asia Pacific” conducted jointly with IDC.

The global survey conducted in various markets including India across a range of industries observes that challenges like hard to use tools, lack of data literacy, lineage and integrity, as well as scattered and unmanaged tools are creating strong barriers in increasing maturity in data and analytics.

According to the research, Indian enterprises’ top business priorities include customer experience, new product development and cost reduction, which are also the areas where major gaps between business priorities and performance exist. Currently, while more than 90 percent of business executives believe that data analytics are important for their organizations to remain performant, only four percent of enterprises have achieved high analytics maturity.

APAC enterprises that are ‘Analytics Experts’ tend to outperform their peers across all major business priorities, especially in areas like cost reduction (56 percent), business model innovation (28 percent), new product development (17 percent) and market expansion (12 percent). India has the least number of organizations who are ‘Analytics Experts’ among the countries surveyed.

To help enterprises to determine their analytics maturity level, IDC designed a framework that assesses their standing across four key dimensions – strategy, data, workforce and process, before providing an aggregated score that identifies Beginners, Practitioners, or Experts. In addition, the framework describes the journey to becoming an Analytics Expert by achieving maturity in strategy, data, workforce, and process.

The research found that enterprises are more mature in strategy and data dimensions, with 53 percent having achieved buy-in and alignment amongst key stakeholders regarding analytics initiatives. A large majority, however, lack the necessary data (91 percent), workforce (87 percent) and process capabilities (97 percent), which are the most crucial for driving data-driven transformation at scale and deriving long-term business value.

It also suggests that enterprises need to build data, workforce or process-related capabilities to derive business value from data analytics. In their daily roles, executives across the region currently struggle with hard to use tools (55 percent), scattered and unmanaged tools (49 percent), lack of timely access to data (44 percent), data lineage and integrity (44 percent) and lack of data literacy (43 percent).

These challenges are exacerbated by increased complexity and organizational demands for data analytics to be delivered at greater speed and scale, with the average enterprise currently facing internal requests to include 26 new data sources and 30 new data types per month.

“In today’s volatile, uncertain and challenging business environment, enterprises in India have expressed the need to invest in mission-critical business areas. In addition, with the evolving needs of customers, enterprises must innovate their business models to meet new needs,” said Julian Quinn, Senior Vice President, APJ, Alteryx.

According to Quinn, “The findings show a consensus towards the critical role that analytics plays in driving business performance. Yet, organizations are grappling with multiple challenges in using data analytics, uncovering the need to improve data, workforce and process analytics capabilities. To deliver breakthrough outcomes, organizations need to automate processes and democratize data analytics, elevating workforce’s ability to gain on-demand insights for thriving in their roles.”

“Despite the rapid rate of digital transformation and data generation, many organizations in India are not yet experts in data analytics. They are at the Beginners stage in their workforce and process dimensions which are critical for empowering employees to do their jobs better, faster and with greater impact,” said Dr. Chris Marshall, Associate Vice President, APAC, IDC.

“In the face of workforce and process challenges, organizations today can close the gaps with advanced analytics tools. Analytic process automation, in particular, is a low-code solution that has emerged as a way forward to remove friction, enabling analytics capabilities to scale quickly across the entire organization,” he said.

The research findings also highlight the potential of a self-service, human-centric analytics automation platform to bridge existing workforce and process capability gaps, address analytics challenges faced by executives, and put organizations on a path to become Analytics Experts.

“Data should no longer sit idly in an organization. With the help of analytics automation, an organization can leverage its best assets – people, processes and data – to empower their workforce to increase overall organizational performance and efficiency so that decision-making is faster and more reliable,” said Quinn.