CEO Today Magazine August 2018 Edition

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 20 SPECIAL FEATURES Making the Most of Data By Gaurav Dhillon Chairman and CEO of SnapLogic Whether it’s customer, financial or employee data, structured or unstructured, from inside or outside the organisation, the modern enterprise increasingly runs on data. Thankfully for businesses, data is in no short supply, and they’re generating greater volumes of data than ever before. Business leaders rely on data for a variety of business-critical applications; from informing business strategy, unlocking new revenue streams, and, perhaps most importantly, remaining competitive in a market where rivals are using data to do likewise. In recent research we conducted with IT decision makers (ITDMs) at large enterprises, improving business processes (64%), driving operational efficiencies and reducing costs (57%), and improving customer service (54%) were seen as key ambitions driven by their companies’ data. It’s worrying then, that fewer than three in 10 (29%) ITDMs claim to have complete trust in their organisations’ data when it comes to making business-critical decisions like those mentioned above. Given these important goals for data, the source of this data mistrust is worthy of attention. Around three quarters (74%) of our respondents believe that, despite their company having more data than ever, it’s struggling to make proper use of it, with a key cause being a lack of data sharing across the business. A staggeringly low 2% of respondents consider their organisation to be completely effective at sharing data, with siloed teams across the business often working with incomplete, inconsistent, or redundant data. So what’s holding data sharing back in these businesses? The reasons for this are as varied as the data types their companies hold. From a technological perspective, mismatched and inconsistent systems (42%),