Added value from data structures

Two-thirds of all companies do not exploit the potential of their data

Companies collect immense amounts of data every day. But how do they find the information that is really relevant? How do they prepare and analyze the data? And how do they succeed in deriving a business benefit from it, in other words, in really turning the data "into gold"? NTT Data commissioned a survey of 250 IT decision-makers in Germany to answer these questions.

The results: 66 percent of IT decision-makers state that the available data is not being used optimally in their companies. 32 percent attribute this primarily to the fact that those responsible do not have enough data expertise to exploit the potential of the data. Other obstacles cited by respondents include limited budgets and the fact that the topic of data use is not a priority in their company. As a result, however, enormous potential for process optimization and the implementation of promising new business models falls by the wayside.

“The survey is intended to motivate decision-makers to give high priority to the topics of data competence and strategy."

Thomas Stoecker,
Senior Vice President Strategic Industry and Management Advisory, NTT Data

But both a platform and transformation services already exist in the SAP community. JiVS IMP, the system-independent information management platform from the Swiss provider Data Migration International, has already proven its usefulness in over 2000 projects worldwide. The platform ensures a clean separation between the data and application layers and thus radically accelerates the extraction, transformation and migration of legacy data via the application layer and SAP's standard tools.

Nevertheless, there is a need to catch up on the strategic foundations of data use in many places among existing SAP customers: According to the NTT survey, more than half of the companies have either not yet developed a data strategy at all or only a partial concept. 61 percent of IT decision-makers also state that they lack the necessary tools to scale data and IT processes and create a uniform data platform. The effort required to manage the data is correspondingly high: According to the study, in every second company, at least 20 percent of working time is spent on data management each week. In eleven percent of the companies, it is even at least 50 percent - that is, almost 23 weeks per year.

A data-to-value approach can provide a remedy. This enables companies to design their infrastructure in such a way that continuous value creation from their data is ensured. They gain valuable insights, drive digitization based on them, and have their compliance, governance, and IT security requirements under control. A platform can make this possible by supporting business objects from SAP and non-SAP systems. With the help of IT platform tools, for example, Hawle Armaturen, a Swiss production and trading company in the water, gas and wastewater sectors, was able to successfully complete its data transformation and migration project as part of the switch to S/4 in just three months.

“A data platform creates support for business objects from SAP and non-SAP systems."

Tobias Eberle,
CRO, Data Migration International 

Furthermore, security aspects play a decisive role in data use: 60 percent of IT decision-makers consider the issue of data security to be "very important". And eight out of ten companies have specific rules for handling digital information - such as user-defined rights management. However, this is not the case in 20 percent of German companies, as the survey shows. This means that data is potentially at risk here. In four out of ten companies, responsibility for data governance is distributed across the entire company. Another four have set up a special organizational unit (Chief Digital Officer) for this purpose. According to the survey, firewalls and encryption are the most frequently used instruments for protecting data. In contrast, data governance frameworks and hardware-based security measures are comparatively less widespread.