The survey, conducted at Talend Connect Paris, reveals that while the push toward digital transformation continues to be a focus, CIOs are also being challenged to spend both time and budget maintaining day-to-day business operations. As a result, their focus for the year ahead is split between technology advancement and “keeping the lights on.”
“Even today’s savviest digital leaders recognize that technology alone doesn’t make companies more data-driven,” said Ashley Stirrup, Talend’s chief marketing officer. “Instead, they understand the importance of blending the right people, processes, and technologies needed to increase the strategic value of their data. These leaders create a culture that views data as a strategic asset that should be infused into every step of a decision-making process. This discipline delivers the business agility needed to remain competitive in today’s marketplace.”
The most notable CIO insights revealed by the survey include:
· Big Data Projects are on the Rise: Enterprise organizations have reached a new level of comfort with big data, with just over 80 percent of respondents indicating they have plans for at least one big data initiative in 2017, which is almost double the number of completed big data projects in 2016. Focus areas for 2017 initiatives include big data analytics and customer-360 initiatives.
· Real-Time Analytics is Top Priority: Twenty-six percent of respondents noted real-time analytics as their top priority for 2017. Metadata management was a close second at 20 percent, and self-service data preparation was a priority for 18 percent of respondents. While AI/Machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) are on the radar of many CIOs, they rank much lower in importance, garnering only 10 percent and five percent of votes respectively.
· Big Data is Most Often Used to Drive Internal Process Improvements and Advance Customer Service: The job of any IT leader is often split between introducing new technologies to improve the business and keeping everything running securely and cost effectively. This may explain why 27 percent of respondents noted the most valuable impact big data has made on their organization is helping improve internal processes. This was followed closely by improved customer service (20 percent), reducing operating costs (17 percent), and creating new revenue streams (17 percent).
· IT/Business Relationship is Biggest Hurdle to Becoming Data-Driven: Thirty-five percent of survey respondents noted their biggest challenge to becoming data-driven was the relationship between IT and the business. Notably, this relationship gap was more of an obstacle than either budget (23 percent) or having suitable skills, which was only seen as a challenge by 16 percent of respondents.
· Data Governance, Quality and Self-Service Trouble IT: When asked which of the following was the highest priority for their organization, IT decision makers showed a fairly-even split between data governance (37 percent), data quality (33 percent) and self-service (31 percent). These results highlight the pressure felt by organizations to ensure data is clean, managed and widely accessible so employees can leverage it for business success.
"Aligning data-consumption and data-management priorities can lead to a constructive friction in the enterprise, said Toph Whitmore, principal analyst covering big data and analytics at Blue Hill Research. “Leadership is challenged to ensure the success of both the IT managers serving data and the line-of-business stakeholders acting upon it. That's easier said than done, especially when romantic expectations of all-you-can-eat self-service exceed limits of enterprise data governance mandates. But when self-service is delivered in a timely, transparent, governed way, IT leadership ensures security, provides trusted data services and ultimately informs the right business action downstream in the DataOps workflow."
