This is how data-driven SA businesses are

Gartner has named 2017 as the year organisations will become more data-driven, and a Tableau Software survey reveals where South Africa lies on the curve.

As working with and making business decisions based on data becomes mainstream, approaches to data and analytics are becoming more holistic and encompassing the entire business.

Research by Tableau Software reveals that data-driven companies outperform their peers in financial performance.

Because of this, Gartner predicts that data and analytics will drive modern business operations as executives make data and analytics part of the business strategy.

This will allow data and analytics professionals to assume new roles and create business growth as businesses create end-to-end architectures that will allow for data management and analytics from the core to the edge of the organisation.

A local survey conducted by Tableau Software in partnership with MyBroadband reveals that South Africans have recognised the need to adopt a data-driven approach.

87% of respondents recognised the need to prioritise the development of a data-driven focus in at least some parts of their company, mainly driven by a need to improve products and services (43%).

Other reasons why implementing a data-driven approach is important to companies includes to more accurately define business strategies (21%), better understand customers (18%) and predict and anticipate economic and market forces that will impact business (16%).

As many as 75% of companies surveyed feel that they are effectively using data in their decision making, and almost 70% expect to spend at least as much, if not more, on data analytics this year.

Over 83% of companies surveyed are confident that their business and IT teams can work together to be more data-driven across the organisation in 2017.

This is being driven mainly by top management (46%) and IT teams (38%) rather than BI teams (21%), individuals (16%) or individual departments (15%).

Customer engagement was named the most common source of data to base company decisions on (50%), followed closely by analytics software (46%), finance (38%) and cloud-based BI and analysis tools (26%).

However, only 22% reported being happy with their existing BI solution.

Cost constraints were identified as the top challenge affecting companies from developing a fully data-driven organisation (44%).

Other challenges include lack of understanding and skills in data analytics from wider employees (28%), lack of support from senior non-IT business leaders (17%), difficulty in finding a secure and governed solution (14%), and poor visibility of what the business needs (13%).

For more information, check out Tableau Software’s Guide on How to Build a Culture of Self-Service Analytics.