Businesses Neglecting to Harness Benefits of Data

Companies are failing to maximise the potential of their data to give valuable business insights, Lifeline IT’s own research has shown.

In our annual ‘IT Trends Survey’, despite 83% of organisations saying they kept data that was more than five years old, almost a third said they did nothing with this information to help improve company performance.

This was in spite of 60% admitting they are aware of business tools that can perform this analytical task.

The reasons given for not evaluating data were because companies wrongly thought it would not be of any benefit (47%) or that the process would be too complicated (29%).

The research asked clients and organisations across a range of sectors about their data management habits. More than two thirds of respondents said they had a statutory obligation to keep data and 22% were unsure if keeping this information was a legal requirement.

Two thirds of those questioned said they kept the vast majority (80% or more) of data electronically and 83% stored this information in a mix of cloud-based storage and company servers.

Commented Daniel: “We’ve always suspected that companies hold vast amounts of data and this research confirms it. However, many organisations aren’t using this wealth of information to get powerful knowledge about their customers, how the company is performing, as well as insights into sales trends and future growth.

“Analysis of company data can be relatively simple, providing you know what to look for and are familiar with the correct tools to use. We can help you with all these things – at Lifeline IT we’re well versed in exploring our own data, so we can apply the same systems and analysis with your business to help shape strategy and growth.”

The research findings also showed:

• Microsoft documents (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) were the most commonly stored documents (37%), followed by graphics, photos and videos (29%), structured data systems (24%), then PDFs (11%).
• 73% said they ‘cleaned’ their data (i.e. removed duplicates of documents, updated historical information etc).
• Almost half said they believed data becomes obsolete in one to five years, with 37% thinking it would no longer be relevant after five years.