Businesses lack big data strategy: Capgemini

More than half of respondents to a Capgemini study do not feel big data is viewed strategically at senior levels of their organisation, despite its contribution to decision-making.

The study of 607 managers – about 10 percent of whom are in Australia and New Zealand – found that decision-making was increasingly driven by data, rather than "intuition" or tacit knowledge.

However, respondents said there remained a lag in some sectors to formalise what Capgemini called a "big data culture", particularly in upper echelons of businesses.

The report also found that 90 percent of managers would have altered decisions made in the past three years had better data been at hand – framing the importance of a formal big data strategy.

Capgemini's South East Asia CEO Deepak Nangia said that high regulation in sectors such as finance and energy meant executives wanted to "document and back up any decisions" they made.

"The only way to back up your decisions is to have hard analytical data behind it rather than intuition or at least semi-intuition," Nangia said.

But decision makers' growing reliance on hard data did not necessarily reflect a lack of trust in the intuition of the management body, he noted.

"[Management] themselves are looking for data to make better decisions. It's not that their decision making is being circumspect".

Although there was not much difference between the A/NZ and global statistics, Nangia noted that financial services in A/NZ were slightly more dependent on "hard analytics information" in decision-making than their regional counterparts.