Average data queries take too long, yet organizations need daily data insights to make decisions

58% of organizations make decisions based on outdated data, according to an Exasol research.

The report reveals that 84% of organizations are under increasing pressure to make faster decisions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet 58% of organizations lack access to real-time insights.

The report further reveals that 63% of respondents confirm that daily insights are needed to make informed business decisions, but these are hampered by long query run times.

A query taking to long to come back

75% of respondents have to wait between 2 hours and a full day for a query to come back, and only 15% of respondents’ query run times are between 15 and 60 minutes. 56% believe they can’t make informed decisions based on their organization’s data.

“As a healthcare, retail, or financial services business you cannot afford to make decisions based on yesterday’s data,” said Rishi Diwan, CPO of Exasol.

“If the pandemic has made one thing clear it’s that business conditions can turn on a dime, yet 6 in 10 businesses find themselves saddled with decision-making infrastructure that is just not responsive enough.”

The report is based on a global survey of 2,500 data decision makers and reveals ample pessimism among data and IT professionals regarding the extent to which current infrastructure set-ups can power a crisis recovery. According to the research:

• 51% believe their organization’s data infrastructure will need improvements in order to help them recover from macro or micro economic challenges.
• The top areas highlighted for performance improvement include data literacy (84%), data infrastructure (55%) and data quality (33%). However, 85% report action being taken to improve literacy across the business, which is an encouraging sign.
• Of the 36% of organizations that have increased the size of their decision-making teams during the COVID-19 pandemic to compensate the long time-to-insights, 86% have experienced an increase in decision-making speed.
• 69% of respondents reported receiving a higher number of data analytics requests from both multiple business departments and their end-users in recent months.

Demand for data analytics will continue to rise

Going forward, 45% of respondents agreed that demand for data analytics will continue to rise. While the bulk of these requests is expected to come from marketing, operations and sales, demand from all areas is expected to increase, adding to the urgency for organizations to review their data-driven decision-making capabilities.

“One way that organizations compensate for the long time-to-insights during the COVID-19 pandemic is by expanding the number of people with decision-making authority,” said Mathias Golombek, CTO at Exasol.

“Our research clearly shows that organizations want to increase their speed and agility regarding data-driven decisions. Data-democratization and self-service analytics across the organization are the ultimate goal, but existing legacy systems are struggling with these workloads. That’s where a reduction of query response times from hours to seconds is a game changer.”

“If you want to evolve towards a data-driven agile enterprise, you need to start with your existing data infrastructure. Not only must it be set up to support your future growth, but it should also enable data democratization,” said Philip Howard, Bloor Research.

“You should also look at whether your infrastructure can deliver the time to insight – the performance – that you need. Can it scale across all your knowledge workers? Because if it doesn’t do all of these things, then it’s not supporting your business goals and you need to think about changing it.”