Study suggests, few European companies view Big Data as ‘very relevant’

Study suggests, few European companies view Big Data as ‘very relevant’
Innovation
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bigdata

Each year, Steria’s Business Intelligence Maturity Audit (biMA®) conducts a survey across 20 European countries to examine the readiness of European business in embracing Big Data. Despite all of the excitement around the value Big Data is expected to bring companies and individuals alike, it looks like European businesses still are a ways-off from being ready to join the Big Data revolution. This years study offers some disappointing results, with only 7% of companies  7% of European companies grade Big Data as very relevant to their business, which is certainly a wake-up call that it will take some time before Big Data truly becomes the norm.

While the study does point out that business have made progress on improving BI use within their organizations, very few companies actually leverage Big Data as a strategic asset for business development. Some additional highlights technical and organization challenges that the study highlighted include:

  • 72% of companies don’t have a Business Intelligence (BI) strategy and 70% of survey participants state that their company has not established a BI governance.
  • Data quality is the Achilles heel of BI and continues to be neglected, despite being the foundation of all BI analysis. 38% of companies have a data problem.
  • A lack of data governance, insufficient standardisation of internal processes and no master data management system (38% of businesses do not have any) also play a key role in poor data quality and the inability to share and integrate data across the business.

As Steria points out in their analysis of the results, given the tough economic climate that looks to continue to some extent for the forseeable future means that Big Data will become crucial for the all organisations’ competitiveness, innovation and growth. In Europe where the economic challenges have been particularly acute, European businesses should, perhaps, have even more reason to embrace Big Data.

The full study offers quite a bit of rich insights on the subject, which you can download for free here.