Budget constraints are top barrier to Big Data success: Study

According to some of the most forward-thinking experts specialising in Big Data structure, such as Gartner and IBM, a data governance plan must be put into place in order for Big Data strategies to be successful. Data governance plans comprise the technical and security policies and procedures that become the foundation of the Big Data strategy at any company.  InformationWeek in 2014 reported on their Big Data survey that reflected trends in the development of data governance plans at companies around the world.

According to InformationWeek’s 2013 survey on Big Data, budget constraints are the top barrier to the successful use of Big Data (38 percent), followed by lack of business interest (13 percent), and more important priorities for the IT department, tied with lack of Big Data management tools (11 percent).  More than 40 percent of the respondents called their data analysis practices either “limited” or “abacus-like”.

One of the key tools for assessing and leveraging Big Data is a data dashboard that could display data trends from a variety of company sectors, such as CRM, finance, online audience, sales and social media sentiment. The most popular application of a data dashboard is an audience usage dashboard.  According to an InformationWeek survey, 90 percent of executive respondents said they plan to use dashboards for key metrics by more than 20 percent of the employees. Particularly useful additions to the dashboard are sales team metrics, including outbound calls, sales rep site visits and proposals generated, activity levels from your business’ CRM system, and online usage patterns such as social media, paid content subscription trends, story engagement, content popularity trends, e-commerce trends and more.