Lack of data maturity prevents organizations from increasing sales or promoting environmental sustainability. This is clear from recent HPE research, according to which only 3% of companies reach the highest level of data maturity.

The average organization’s level of data maturity, or the ability to create value from the data, is 2.6 on a five-point scale. Only 3% of companies are reaching the highest level of maturity, according to a YouGov survey for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) of more than 8,600 decision makers from all industries in 19 countries.

As HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri points out, there is a broad consensus that data has enormous potential to improve the way we live and work. However, unlocking this potential requires a change in digital transformation strategies of the organizations.

“Businesses must put data at the center of their transformations to close their capacity gaps, strengthen their autonomy, and enable collaboration across data ecosystems.”

Lack of data capabilities impede key results

The global survey is based on a maturity model developed by HPE that assesses an organization’s ability to create value from the data. At the lowest maturity level (1), called “data anarchy”, data sets are isolated from each other and are not systematically analyzed to generate insights or results. The highest level (5) is “data economy”. At this level, an organization strategically leverages data to drive results. These are based on a unified access to internal and external data sources that are analyzed with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

According to the survey results, 14% of organizations are at maturity level 1 (data anarchy), while 29% are at level 2 (data reporting). For their part, 37% of the organizations surveyed are at level 3 (data insights), while 17% are at level 4 (data centrality), and only 3% are at level 5. (data economy).

Lack of data capabilities, in turn, limits the ability of organizations to increase sales (30%), innovate (28%), improve customer experience (24%), improve environmental sustainability (21%) and increase internal efficiency (21%).

Only 13% of organizations say that data strategy is a key part of their corporate strategy

Other of the most outstanding findings of the report indicate that only 13% of the organizations indicate that data strategy is a key part of your corporative strategy.

In this sense, almost half of the respondents (48%) acknowledge that their organization does not allocate budget for data initiatives, or only occasionally finances data initiatives through the IT budget.

Only 28% of respondents confirmed that they have a strategic focus on providing data-driven products or services.

Likewise, almost half of those surveyed indicate that their organizations do not use methodologies such as machine learning (machine learning) or deep learning (deep learning). Instead, 29% rely on spreadsheets, or the business intelligence business intelligence and predefined reports, in 18% of cases, for data analysis.

Greater control through the clouds

One characteristic of a low data maturity level is that there is no overall data and analytics architecture. Instead, data is isolated to individual applications or locations. This is the case for 34% of those surveyed.

In fact, only 19% have implemented a central data hub or structure that offers unified access to real time data throughout your organization. Another 8% say that this data center also includes external data sources.

62% of respondents argue that it is important to have a high degree of control over your data to create value

In line with these considerations, 62% of those surveyed argue that it is strategically important to have a high degree of control over their data and the means to create value from it.

Additionally, 52% say they are concerned that data monopolies have too much control over their ability to create value from data. 39% are reassessing their cloud strategy as a consequence of rising cloud costs, for 42%, while 37% point to data security concerns, the same percentage pointing to the need for a more flexible data architecture, and 32 % indicates a lack of control over their data.

The results of this study were presented during HPE Discover Frankfurt 2022, where the company announced new application, analytics, and development services for HPE GreenLake. With them, the firm will allow organizations to drive a data modernization strategy for production workloads in hybrid cloud environments.

initial image | luis gomes