EXECUTIVE SUMMARY SPEND AND TRENDS REPORT
and Spend , these are ultimately issues that can be solved by the analytics and data science organization. The biggest opportunities are a ‘better understanding of the data from the business,’ ‘adding new tools,’ better data governance,’ ‘democratization,’ and ‘talent.’ In these results, analytics and data science leaders seem to be saying that they see how their actions could influence organizational growth. Infusing the enterprise with understanding, governance and then ultimately democratization through perhaps the adding of additional new tools is the way forward. ‘Data quality’ has been-and will continue to be the focus for analytics and data science leaders. Rather than simply presenting results through visualization tools, the next six months look to feature a greater focus on data integration. Data transformation and augmented analytics are happily big picture, forward thinking initiatives that showcase the analytics and data science discipline playing an integral role in the advancement of global corporate enterprise. The past has featured hard work. The present features the opportunity to engage in the democratization of data and provide analytics inspired insights to business leaders in a way that helps drive business impact and value. The future is bright for those that continue to work and build in the present.
The MADS and All Things Insights community completed an extensive survey covering what folks are thinking, how they’re spending and the issues they face. Our analytics and data science community has a solid core of top-level leaders along with a fair share of ‘front-lines’ folks. More respondents are ‘people managers’ than ‘individual contributors.’ The community is spread across several different industries with a fair share of large organizations represented along with some smaller companies. Respondents feel strongly that analytics and data science are becoming more integrated into both corporate and operational decision making . It’s interesting that there is a near 10% delta in favor of corporate decision-making being more integrated. The difference might have roots in industry distinctions of respondents. But perhaps it also might have to do with operational leaders having to deal with the inherent pitfalls of actual integration . The overt positive is that integration is happening for the majority. Thoughts around the change in the level of influence within the organization over the past two years are less vociferous. That said, there are, of course, many ways to analyze this data point! Yes, over half feel that analytics and data science has ‘increased in influence.’ Which is a positive. But the third of folks who feel that “influence has remained steady” might already have a high level of influence. Stepping back, it’s simply good news that less than 10% of respondents feel that organizational influence has decreased. Working across departments is the biggest challenge for our analytics and data science community. For over a third, ‘Talent/Hiring the right skillset’ is the top challenge. It’s surprising that this isn’t true for 100% of respondents. For just under a third, ‘data quality’ as well as ‘business not understanding analytics and data science’ is the biggest challenge. As noted in Collaboration
Seth Adler All Things Insights
Powered by FlippingBook