Splunk in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group, recently released the Economic Impact of Data Innovation 2023, a global research report that quantifies the economic benefits of mature data practices. The report reveals the most data-savvy companies are increasing profits by 9.5%, are 2.9 times more likely to beat the competition to market, and are twice as likely to exceed financial expectations.
“A strong data foundation is essential to staying ahead of the curve–and we are proud of our proactive approach to extracting innovative value from our data,” said Mike Hughes, CISO of REI. “Our data visibility bolsters efficiency, competitiveness and resilience against an advanced threat landscape and macro challenges. Splunk is a critical element of our overall strategy to ensure we can scale and deliver the best experience for our customers.”
The research report defines leaders as organizations that have achieved excellence in the six key areas of data classification, aggregation, quality, analysis skills, analysis tools and monitoring. Key findings include:
- Data leaders experience increased profits and innovation. With an average increase of 9.5% in gross profits, data leaders report launching nine new products per year that wouldn’t be possible without their data innovation capabilities, compared to the beginner’s average of three new products per year. They are also more likely to report that applying data innovation to sales, marketing and customer service/support has contributed to increasing customer lifetime value (49%, versus 30% of beginners). In addition, data leaders are more resilient and quicker to identify and remediate security incidents by 11%.
- Data leaders beat out their competition. Data leaders are 5.7 times as likely to say their organization almost always makes better decisions than competitors. They are 4.5 times as likely to believe their organization is in a very strong position to compete and succeed in their markets over the next few years.
- Data leaders are proactively operationalizing and monetizing their data. Leaders are also more likely to say that their data monetization streams are additive and grow faster. They have operationalized 38% more of their data assets while also deriving 2.3 times as much of their revenue via data monetization.
Virtually every organization is under pressure to keep up with the rapid rate at which data is growing. However, the organizations that feel the most pressure are also having the most success: 67% of data innovation leaders report feeling a high degree of pressure versus only 41% of intermediates and 15% of beginners.
“Data-driven innovation gives you a massive edge,” said Ammar Maraqa, Chief Strategy Officer, Splunk. “Organizations that prioritize investments in collecting and using their data have full visibility into their digital systems and business performance, which makes it easier to adapt and respond to disruptions, security threats and changing market conditions.”
Data Leaders Innovate Across Industries
Across every industry, data provides an opportunity to increase profit and improve performance, with unique challenges and outcomes. The industry-focused addendum to the report highlights these vital areas. Key findings include:
- Public sector: 20% spend more than a quarter of their IT budgets on solutions and staff that investigate, monitor, analyze and act on data — well above the 8% cross-industry average.
- Financial services: 79% have adopted AI/ML for data innovation, versus 67% overall.
- Healthcare: While 9% of surveyed organizations are among the most mature group of data innovators, 11% of healthcare and life sciences organizations achieved leader status.
- Manufacturing: 54% apply data innovation to supply chain and operations use cases, compared to 45% of organizations across all industries.
- Retail: An above-average 10% are data innovation leaders, and retail organizations are more likely to report greater brand loyalty, customer lifetime value, revenue from data monetization, product innovation and a multitude of other data innovation-fueled outcomes.
Key Findings of India:
- Companies in India are faced with data innovation challenges, with 59% of the respondents admitting that their data is growing faster than their ability to keep up with the data storage and analysis. Moreover, 37% say that the data does not have the quality or format needed to support innovation.
- However, India is making data innovation its priority. More than half of Indian companies (52%) highly prioritize the analysis and operationalizing of their data over the next 24 months
- India leads globally when it comes to automating its data monitoring. 55% of Indian companies have made excellent progress in automated data monitoring which provides real-time insights enabling efficient business operations.
- In addition, Indian companies have greatly progressed in maintaining their supply chains. 85% of respondents claim that in the last one year, they have avoided a production line outage or disruption due to its ability to use data to identify the need for predictive maintenance on production systems.
- When it comes to emerging technologies, business leaders have identified four technologies that are helping their businesses with data: AI and ML (84%), cloud analytics (85%), Observability (57%), Edge Computing (69%).
