As 75% of organisations, interviewed for a recent study, currently, shift from business intelligence (BI) to data analytics – citing a wish for better data (quality, availability and validity) – ironically, 82% of organisations admitted that they do not know where their critical data is located.

The study by Exasol, the database management software company, also found that while the majority regard themselves as 25%-50% of the way through their transformation process, only 11% are seeing their efforts fully pay off. More than half (55%) agree fragmentation of data across multiple databases is slowing that progress.

>See also: Nine years on, ‘Big Data’ is finally hitting the mainstream

Mathias Golombek, CTO at Exasol, said: “Organisations are getting their hands on better data and they see the possibilities, but the data analytics they seek are often out of reach because that data is residing in departmental databases or mounting up in data lakes.”

“They are racing to get to the next stage – becoming more practical and applying that data to business decision making – but most data science teams don’t have the data infrastructure they need to surface that dark data and make data analytics available on demand.”

According to the study, a mere 1% of organisations currently regard themselves as a data-driven enterprise, while only 54% of decisions are driven by data.

>See also: How to choose a data science vendor

Another common reason for project failure was security and privacy (29%), this concern is linked to the introduction of new governance practices and uncertainty over the EU’s GDPR.

“GDPR has done the citizen a great service: it’s made organisations look to where their data is and approach it from a human perspective rather than bits and blocks. Businesses that have aggregated data across previously siloed sources so that they can quickly run a subject access request or deletion, for example, have simultaneously created a single view of the customer – the very thing today’s customer-centric enterprises are so desperate to achieve. Companies that address the double-edged sword of data analytics to improve customer’s experiences will outperform the old guard,” Golombek added.

>See also: Data predictions for those who will live them: 2018 in analytics

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