One of TSL Tech Research’s objectives is to uncover technology challenges experienced by today’s companies. Recently, we conducted an online survey in which we asked IT leaders at firms with between 1k and 5k employees about the challenges their companies face in delivering data-driven outcomes.
Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) is crucial for companies that want to make important decisions based on Business Intelligence (BI) instead of intuition. Using DDDM enables businesses to improve performance, boost revenue, and better satisfy customers.
The medium-sized companies surveyed identified data governance, quality, and access as the top challenges preventing them from delivering data-driven outcomes.
TSL Tech Research asked nearly 140 IT professionals what their organization’s top challenges to data-driven outcomes were. The results were as follows:
Working with secure, accurate, and complete data was clearly the top concern of companies when making data-driven decisions to achieve outcomes. More than 50% of companies identified data governance as a top challenge. Half of the respondents chose data quality and consistency as a top challenge. Data access was the third biggest challenge.
Rounding out the top 5 challenges were those related to supporting infrastructure. Cloud optimization and the ability to scale data infrastructure were the fourth and fifth biggest challenges to reaching data-driven results.
Discoverability & metadata management was tied with data engineering talent shortage at 18%. Technology skills gaps in many specialized areas are a big issue for organizations. Discoverability relates to the third-ranking challenge, ease of data access. Metadata management is the practice of organizing, cataloging, and governing how data is described to improve data access through discoverability.
While high Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) costs and complexity ranked last, this challenge contributes to higher ranking challenges, such as lack of data quality and accessibility. ETL enables companies to make decisions based on a single source of truth.
Key Takeaways:
IT service providers can use these findings to market offerings related to DDDM. To reach and engage target customers, managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs) should promote their services for data governance and compliance. Potential clients may also be looking for virtual CIO (vCIO) services related to data governance and management strategies.
Data infrastructure and cloud strategy services would help prospects create and run cost-effective environments to support data-driven outcomes. Working with an MSP that has expertise in data engineering enables companies to overcome talent gaps.
Data-driven outcomes are the measurable results of making decisions based on data analysis. Using data analytics to make decisions leads to improved performance by companies in many industries, including healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.
By gathering and analyzing data related to customer behavior, market trends, and operations, companies can uncover and apply insights to their strategic choices. Using data for decision making reduces uncertainty to produce favorable results, such as increasing revenue, raising the level of customer satisfaction, and controlling costs.
TSL Tech Research conducts online research to help IT service firms understand what today’s companies need and to uncover insights so we can match organization with ideal technology partners.
Working with the right MSP empowers companies to achieve measurable data-driven outcomes by providing the data management and infrastructure support needed to overcome challenges. An MSP can deliver services for data governance, compliance, and quality.
Find the right technology partner to support your data-driven decision making. Reach out to TSL Tech Research to get started.