Limited Ability To Create Value From Data Stifles Growth
December 8, 2022
While
governments around the world have identified data as a strategic resource to
drive economic and social progress, Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled global
survey results showing that a lack of data maturity hinders both the private and
public sector from achieving key outcomes such as growing sales or advancing
environmental sustainability.
Conducted by YouGov on behalf of HPE, the survey of more than 8,600 decision
makers from across industries and the public sector in 19 countries reveals that
the average organization’s data maturity level – or ability to create value from
data – is 2.6 on a five-point scale, with only three percent reaching the
highest maturity level.
“There is broad consensus that the world’s data holds an enormous potential to
advance the way we live and work – however, unlocking this potential requires a
shift in organizations’ digital transformation strategies,” said Antonio Neri,
president and CEO of HPE. “We must move from ‘cloud first’ to ‘data first’ as
the North Star of digital transformation – meaning that organizations align
their strategic, organizational and technological choices with the overarching
goal of leveraging data as a strategic asset.”

Lack of data capabilities impedes key outcomes
The survey is based on a maturity model developed by HPE that assesses an
organization’s ability to create value from data based on strategic,
organizational and technological criteria. The lowest maturity level 1 is called
“data anarchy”; on this level, data pools are isolated from one another, and are
not systematically analyzed to create insights or outcomes. The highest level
(5) is called “data economics”; at this level, an organization strategically
leverages data to drive outcomes, based on a unified access to both internal and
external data sources which are analyzed with advanced analytics and artificial
intelligence.
Survey results reveal that 14 percent of organizations are on maturity level 1
(“data anarchy”), 29 percent on level 2 (“data reporting”), 37 percent on level
3 (“data insights”), 17 percent on level 4 (“data centricity”), and just 3
percent are on level 5 (“data economics”).
The lack of data capabilities, in turn, limits organizations’ ability to create
key outcomes such as growing sales (30%), innovating (28%), advancing customer
experience (24%), improving environmental sustainability (21%) and increasing
internal efficiency (21%).
Organizations must close strategic, organizational and technological gaps
The survey provides a detailed view of the strategic, organizational and
technological gaps that organizations must close to capitalize on data along
their entire value chain. Sample findings include:
Only 13 percent of respondents say that their organization’s data strategy is
a key part of their corporate strategy.
Almost half of respondents say their organization allocates either no budget for
data initiatives (28%) or only occasionally funds data initiatives via the IT
budget (20%).
Only 28 percent of respondents confirmed they have a strategic focus on
providing data-driven products or services.
And almost half of respondents say their organizations do not use methodologies
like machine learning or deep learning but rely on spreadsheets (29%) or
business intelligence and canned reporting (18%) for data analysis.
Creating value from data also requires aggregating data or data insights from
different applications, locations or external data spaces. For example, a
manufacturer’s sensor telemetry from sold products can help the R&D department
to better align the next product generation with customer needs, and sharing
insights from patient data among hospitals can advance medical diagnosis.
Organizations want control across clouds and edges
A characteristic of a low data maturity level is that there is no overarching
data and analytics architecture, but data is isolated in individual applications
or locations. This is the case for 34 percent of respondents. On the other hand,
only 19 percent have implemented a central data hub or fabric that provides
unified access to real-time data across their organization, and another 8
percent say this data hub also includes external data sources.
Given that data sources are increasingly distributed across clouds and edges,
the majority of respondents (62%) say that it’s strategically important to have
a high degree of control over their data and the means to create value from
data. More than half of respondents (53%) are concerned that data monopolies
have too much control over their capability to create value from data, and 39
percent are re-evaluating their cloud strategy due to increasing cloud costs
(42%), concerns over data security (37%), the need for a more flexible data
architecture (37%) and the lack of control over their data (32%).
HPE GreenLake brings the cloud to the data to maximize control and outcomes
HPE’s
strategy is focused on helping organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking
value from all of their data, regardless of where it lives. The HPE GreenLake
edge-to-cloud platform enables customers to deploy a cloud-everywhere model with
the freedom to choose the right location for their data and applications while
providing one operating model to orchestrate across edges, colocations, data
centers, and clouds. As a result, customers can control their data assets and
industrialize their data supply chain through a unified data fabric that
empowers analysis and decision making at speed.
“Because of the massive growth of data at the edge, organizations need hybrid
edge-to-cloud architectures where the cloud comes to the data, not the other way
around. HPE GreenLake empowers organizations with the ability to access,
control, protect, govern and unlock the value of data anywhere, unified into one
consistent experience,” added Neri.
Today, HPE bolstered its hybrid cloud leadership by announcing new application,
analytics, and developer services for HPE GreenLake that enable organizations to
drive a data-first modernization strategy for production workloads across hybrid
cloud environments.
Research Methodology
The data is based on an online survey conducted by YouGov between October 26 and
November 18, 2022, among C-level executives, business unit and function leaders,
department and division leaders, first-line managers and team leaders across
industries and the public sector in Australia (N = 500), Brazil (N = 500),
Canada (N = 500), France (N = 500), Germany (N = 500), India (N = 500), Italy (N
= 500), Japan (N = 400), Mexico (N = 500), Netherlands (N = 500), Poland (N =
500), Singapore (N = 500), Spain (N = 200), South Korea (N = 400), Sweden (N =
200), Switzerland (N = 200), Türkiye (N = 200), UK (N = 500), US (N = 1000).