Data as the New Water: The Importance of Investing in Data and Analytics Pipelines

Organisations that invest in data-to-insights capabilities benefit from better decisions and improved outcomes, including 21% increase in revenue

Qlik has announced a global study that shows organisations that strategically invest in creating data-to-insights capabilities through modern data and analytics pipelines are seeing significant bottom line impact. The global IDC survey, sponsored by Qlik, of 1,200 business leaders* shows that companies with a higher ability to identify, gather, transform, and analyse data to glean insights benefited from higher quality decision making and better business outcomes, including improved operational efficiencies, increased revenue and increased profits. 

Organisations are inundated with data, and many are struggling to maximise the value of that data since it’s flowing through unintegrated and leaky data pipelines. The research shows a direct relationship between creating stronger data-to-insights capabilities through data pipeline investments – ones that successfully deploy data management and analytics solutions to close pipeline gaps – to decision making that drives business outcomes. 

• 86% of organisations in the top half of those surveyed with the best data analytics pipelines also get the highest decision-making scores
• 67% of organisations in the top half of those surveyed with the highest decision-making scores had the highest business outcomes scores

“Even in these challenging economic times, CEOs at major enterprises are continuing to invest in their data pipelines to close the gaps and enable their organisations with more high quality and valuable data for decisions,” said Dan Vesset, Group Vice President, Analytics and Information Management at IDC. “These leaders are increasing their enterprise intelligence quotient by automating the data preparation cycle through technology, giving employees the vital tools and time needed to analyse data for impactful insights that create real business value.”

Companies in the survey with the highest demonstrable data-to-insights capabilities, resulting in strong data pipelines that drive better decisions, see significant bottom line impact. 

• 76% said operational efficiency improved by an average of 21%
• 75% said revenue increased by an average of 21%
• 74% said profit increased by an average of 22%

The challenges to deploying data pipelines that drive better decisions and business outcomes are significant. Organisations are dealing with complex and varied data types and sources, which can leak through data and analytics pipeline gaps. Of those surveyed, over 60% experienced significant challenges in assessing the value of data and identifying valuable data sources, often due to a lack of a data catalogue. And over 42% surveyed identified assuring data correctness as a main challenge when processing or transforming data for analysis. 

So even as organisations invest in techniques like machine learning and AI to enhance insight generation and analysis, it’s clear that the success of these investments is highly dependent on having an agile, automated and agnostic data pipeline that closes the gaps by working across any cloud, system and data source in real-time. Only by closing these gaps to eliminate data leaks can organisations transform their data pipelines to provide continuous and reliable enterprise-ready data that drives action and outcomes.

“Organisations must close the gaps in their leaky data pipelines to consistently transform their data into ongoing and real business value,” said James Fisher, Chief Product Officer at Qlik. “Our unique end-to-end approach to data integration and analytics gives organisations the ability to improve their data-to-insights capabilities at the speed of business for greater responsiveness and better outcomes.”  Qlik’s data integration and data analytics platforms, together with its data literacy as a service offering, deliver the industry’s only end-to-end approach to Active Intelligence. Unlike traditional BI, Active Intelligence realises the potential in data pipelines by bringing together data at rest with data in motion for continuous intelligence derived from real-time, up-to-date information, and is specifically designed to take or trigger immediate actions. This eliminates data leaks by closing the gaps from relevant to actionable data (Qlik Data Integration), actionable data to actionable insights (Qlik Analytics) and from investment to value (Data Literacy as a Service).