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MicroStrategy Exec: Harnessing the Power of Data is the Key to Digital Transformation

Ninety percent of enterprise organizations say that data and analytics are important to their digital transformation efforts – and that means your organization must now leverage data more efficiently and effectively than ever before to stay competitive, according to MicroStrategy.

Analytics are no longer something that’s just nice for a company to have. They’re a “must-have to stay relevant” today, Vijay Anand, MicroStrategy VP of product marketing, said Aug. 1 during a webcast discussing the key findings of the company’s 2018 Global State of Enterprise Analytics Report.

Advances in analytics and business intelligence (BI) are being made rapidly now, he said, noting there’re been “more things that’s happened in the last two years than has happened in the last 20” years in this sector. As a result, MicroStrategy is not just talking to company CIOs anymore, but “every single business team,” he said.

In this era of accelerating digital disruption, more than 57% of enterprise organizations are using data and analytics to drive strategy and change, he said.
Companies need to now harness the power of technologies including augmented intelligence, machine learning (ML), augmented and virtual reality, and telemetry, as well as chat bots, the cloud, mobile devices and security, to take advantage of the true power of data and analytics, he noted.

Findings of the latest survey, conducted for MicroStrategy by research company Hall & Partners, included 27% of respondents saying their organizations had collaborative deployment between IT and business with governance and security frameworks, but without access to big data, mobile and predictive technologies, he said. That was the largest percentage of responses to the question “How mature is the analytics technology used by your organization?”

Another finding: Forty percent of respondents said 50-75% of their entire organizations had access to data and analytics, Anand said. In comparison, 37% said 10-49% of their organizations had that access, 16% had more than 75%, 6% had less than 10% and 1% didn’t know.


Meanwhile, 40% of respondents said creating an analytics strategy had the most positive impact on the success of their analytics initiatives, followed by developing a data-driven culture at 37%, data preparation best practices, establishing an effective data architecture/technology infrastructure and education/training (36% each), executive interest and buy-in (34%), and attracting/retaining top talent and self-service analytics capabilities for business users (30% each). Other strategies that yielded the most positive impact on success were all cited by less than 30% of respondents and included automation (26%), branded mobile applications (22%) and natural language generation (NLG)/voice capabilities (20%).


“A majority of folks,” meanwhile, “think that data privacy and security concerns are definitely the cause for challenges” in being able to more effectively use data and analytics within organizations, Anand said. Forty-nine percent of respondents cited that as the greatest barrier, he noted.

Over the next five years, the trend expected to have the greatest impact on organizations’ analytics initiatives is expected to be cloud computing, he said, pointing out that 24% of respondents cited that. It was followed by big data at 20%, artificial intelligence and ML at 18%, the Internet of Things at 16%, digital identity management at 12%, blockchain at 7% and voice/NLG at only 3%.

One of the “three top takeaways” of the report was that data-driven enterprise organizations are realizing a growing competitive advantage in key areas such as efficiency and productivity, faster and more effective decision making and better financial performance, he said.

The second top takeaway: Most organizations are planning to make larger investments in their overall analytics initiatives and related talent. The last main takeaway: Although many respondents are optimistic that they’re leaders in data and analytics, most organizations still “need to work on the foundational items that will make them Intelligent Enterprises,” according to MicroStrategy.

The report was based on the responses of more than 500 analytics and BI professionals in Brazil, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. across more than 20 industries, according to Anand.