Increase sales, efficiency or environmental sustainability? Without a maturity date it is an (almost) impossible mission

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Data is a strategic resource for guiding the economic and social progress of a country system. Everyone, including governments, is aligned with this assumption, it is a pity that the lack of “data maturity” constitutes a serious obstacle (both in the private and public sectors) for the achievement of key objectives. The alarm is raised by an international research conducted by YouGov on behalf of HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) on a sample of over 8,600 decision makers of companies active in all sectors. The figure that should prompt serious reflection by the leaders of companies and institutions is the following: the ability to create value from organizational data stands at an average value of 2.6 on a scale of 5, and only 3% of companies that participated in the research reaches the highest level of maturity. At the basis of this gap, the authors of the study explain, there are various factors (also of a technological nature) and it is especially notable to point out that the majority of the interviewees (62% overall, 63% in Italy) consider it strategically important for their companies to control their data and the tools to create value from the data itself. In other words: good intentions are not lacking but the execution component is missing (as often happens). The need to unleash the potential of data to advance the way we live and work is therefore real, but to do this, as Claudio Bassoli CEO of HPE for Italy also points out, “we need a change in the digital transformation strategies of companies, it is necessary to put data at the center of organizational rethinking paths to fill the current gaps and allow collaboration between different information ecosystems”.

The first problem: the lack of data management capabilities

The analysis carried out by the American multinational takes its cue from a maturity model developed by HPE itself which evaluates an organization’s ability to create value from data based on strategic, organizational and technological criteria. The lowest level of maturity is referred to as “data anarchy” and in this case the data pools are isolated from each other and are not systematically analyzed to generate insights or useful results. When instead a company reaches the highest level, called “data economy”, it is able to strategically exploit the information in its possession to obtain valuable results, based on a unified access to internal and external data sources that are processed with the help of advanced analytics systems and artificial intelligence. Well, 13% of the 500 Italian companies studied are at the lower maturity level and only 4% at the higher one, while the most populated cluster is the middle one (“data insight”), where 34 % of businesses. The lack of data management and valorisation skills, in turn, limits the ability to achieve key objectives such as the increase in sales and internal efficiency (it happens in 34% and 20% of Italian companies), innovation (32%), improving the customer experience (23%) and environmental sustainability (17%).

The gaps to fill: budget, innovative technologies

To exploit data as a strategic asset along the entire value chain, companies are called to put “order” in the priorities related to data management. In this sense, the study highlights how only 13% of the decision makers interviewed affirm that the data strategy of their organization is a fundamental part of the company strategy. In Italy, in particular, 33% of managers confirm that no budgets are allocated for data-related initiatives, while only occasionally (and this happens for one in five companies) are data-related initiatives financed through funds allocated to IT. Furthermore, less than a third of the national sample (29% to be precise) confirms that their organization is strategically focused on data-driven products or services, while the use of models based on machine and deep learning algorithms is of interest in complex only one company out of two. For data analysis, 34% of Italian companies rely on spreadsheets while 15% resort to business intelligence tools and pre-packaged reports.

Control over data in the cloud

The low level of data maturity, this is one of the conclusions reached by the study, is often directly associated with the lack of an integrated data and analysis architecture, precisely because the data is isolated in single applications or locations. Italian companies are affected by this problem in 39% of cases (the global average is equal to 34%) and only 14% of organizations have implemented a centralized data hub capable of providing unified and real-time access to data. Lastly, another issue to pay attention to is the fear (felt by one manager out of two) of not being able to generate value from information due to the limited control exercised over it, given and considering that data sources are increasingly distributed among cloud and edge environments. In this sense, it does not go unnoticed how 39% of the global sample and 26% of the Italian one are re-evaluating their cloud strategy, also due to the increase in the costs of services in the cloud (voice cited by 40% of Italian managers), the need to have a more flexible data architecture (29%) and, precisely, the perception of too little control over one’s own data (26%).