Businesses Face Three Biggest Challenges While Leveraging Big Data

The recently published report from Dun & Bradstreet reveals that businesses are losing customers and missing out on revenue growth opportunities due to poor data practices. Surveyed on 510 business decision-makers across the US and UK, the report, titled "The Past, Present, and Future of Data", found that approximately 20% of businesses have lost a customer due to utilizing inadequate or inaccurate information about them. Conversely, 15% of leaders reported they had failed to sign a new contract with a customer for the same reason.

According to the report, the three biggest challenges businesses still face when it comes to leveraging big data are:

• Protecting data privacy, with 34% respondents
• Having accurate data, with 26%
• Analysing/processing data, with 24% business leaders

Moreover, 41% of business leaders reported that no one in their organization is responsible for the management of data.

Big data is a growing space providing enterprise-level businesses with the resources to make significant, informed business decisions. It comprises a variety of analytics and data-gathering strategies, essentially and has the ability to capture, store and evaluate data on a large scale to notify business decisions.

As part of the survey, the report further divulged that another 22% of businesses responded their financial forecasts have been inaccurate while 17% said they provided too much credit to a customer due to lack of information about them, losing money in the process.

With 31% vs 16% insights collected, data security compliance has been more of a concern in the US than the UK, respectively, most probably due to GDPR requirements. More than 10% of the organizations surveyed even said they have been fined for data issues.

In a statement, Chief Data Officer at Dun & Bradstreet, Monica Richter stated that "Businesses must make data governance and stewardship a priority. Whether leaders are exploring AI or predictive analytics, clean, defined data is key to the success of any program and essential for mitigating risk and growing the business."

Responding over data priority, the report showed that 65% of business leaders consider data will be vital to their organization's future success.

Chief Data Scientist at Dun & Bradstreet, Anthony Scriffignano said in his statement that "Information has always been critical for businesses, but over the past decade, the volume of data, the types of information available and the ability to do new things with that data have expanded enormously." Moving forward, he said, "It's not surprising that many business leaders feel they are still catching up and their organizations are yet to make the most of data – and some have even been fined or lost customers due to incomplete or 'dirty' data."

Big data is an opportunity for businesses to be more thorough in the way they assess and understand the world. The global big data market was estimated at $23.56 billion in 2015 and now is expected to reach $118.52 billion by 2022.

This growth is largely attributable due to the evolution of new emerging technologies and jobs getting transposed in the IT sector because of it. This development is also bringing a major focus on how there is a lack of data management skills among employees.