Australian Market Research

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Dodgy data poses bigger risk to Australians

By Beverley Head

Tuesday, 16 November 2010 19:33

Business IT - Technology

Page 1 of 2 Australians are considerably more at risk from dodgy data than their overseas counterparts – with 58 per cent of Australian managers admitting to making an inaccurate decision because of poor data, compared to just 46 per cent of their international peers.

The local findings of the The Business Impact of Big Data survey, conducted for Accenture-Microsoft joint venture Avanade, show that 62 per cent of C-level managers felt overwhelmed by the amount of data they were already expected to deal with. In addition 46 per cent of senior managers said most of the data they received was inaccurate.

Yet they still wanted more data, more often.

But if the quantity of data rises and the quality is not improved Australian managers’ decision making seems destined to atrophy rather than improve.

According to Jeyan Jeevaratnam, country manager for Avanade Australia; “It is counter-intuitive that too much data is affecting business productivity and effectiveness, but that is what our survey has shown. “

There is no doubt that the volumes of data organisations and individuals are having to deal with are exploding.

In a recent presentation Intel general manager Jason Fedder said that since the internet became part of daily life a decade ago about 150 exabytes of data have passed through it. (An exabyte is a million terabytes.)

But as evidence of global data gluttony, Mr Fedder said that in the coming year internet traffic would exceed 175 exabytes in just 12 months.

That data trajectory will be familiar to many enterprises as they struggle to cope with not only company generated data, but information feeds from sensors, external information systems, and consumers, either directly or via social networks.

Although its survey found even the current data deluge was leading poor decision making, Avanade said company managers wanted even more, not less, data.

One in three executives surveyed believed access to even more sources of data would enable them to do their job better, while two thirds of Australian executives say they still want faster access to data, even though they are challenged to make sense of what they already have.

Mr Jeevaratnam said that the survey demonstrated Australian organisations needed to pay much closer attention to the quality of data they were collecting and how it was being used. The global survey found that internationally 56 per cent of C-level executives already felt overwhelmed by the quantity of data they had to manage, somewhat lower than the Australian experience, which goes some way to explaining their apparently slightly better decision making.