Analytics & the struggles of accessing data

Analytics has become so crucial that all organizations are pushing their way forward to have best of the analytics teams, to get valuable insights from abundance of data they have to drive their business. With advanced capabilities of various in-memory platforms to process ever increasing data sets in few seconds, we have reached a different level where data driven decisions can transform the businesses in a constructive way. We have seen a big development in terms of analytical & predictive tools as well.

Having all this at our disposal (in-memory computing, amazing analytical & predictive tools, highly skilled resources), we still face few bottlenecks which refrain us from optimally utilizing everything that is available. One of them is "access to data". In current organizational setup, we have different teams performing different tasks. They all generate a lot of data. The problem now is sharing of this data within teams. Most of the times we are reluctant to share our data. This is not helping in any way. I am not sure if it is sense of ownership or fear of losing, but it is not helping the organization in the long run. Having as many dimensions of data as possible always gives a better analysis which is not possible when we analyse data sets separately.

I am not sure if it is sense of ownership or fear of losing, but it is not helping the organization in the long run

We might be performing highly as a team, but we should not forget that there is a bigger team, our organization. We keep on talking about confidentiality of data, but from whom we are protecting our data? Employees of the same organization (but different teams of course) who come under same employment policies as we? Do We fear that people outside our team can misuse the data? Or is the fear that, they might better utilize this data than we are doing? It ultimately comes to job security & is not very good for the health of the entire organization. It is like, having a highly equipped state of the art kitchen but devoid of raw material to cook something delicious. Data is the basis on which we are going to do analysis and if we are struggling to get all of it, then we are in trouble.

It is like, having a highly equipped state of the art kitchen but devoid of raw material to cook something delicious.

There is a lot we need to think about this to fully utilize the power of analytics to make data driven decisions & the organizations doing that will definitely be impacting their business in a positive way.