The Digital Business Reality

With the rise of digital business initiatives, the role of data has become much more important. Nearly half (49%) of the  organizations that ESG surveyed stated that data is their business, and another 31% expected to offer data-centric  products and services in the future.1 Unfortunately, traditional IT is often falling behind the curve in these efforts. Line-of business executives surveyed by ESG were four times more likely to say they considered their company’s IT group to be a  business inhibitor versus a competitive differentiator (25% versus 6%). 

Among the executives who believed their IT organization was inhibiting business  success, the two most commonly identified reasons behind that opinion were that  their workers were having difficulty accessing the data they needed for business  operations and analysis (43%) and that their IT organization’s processes to deploy IT  services took too long (43%).2 

Clearly, a need exists for IT leaders to expand their role—to take a focused approach  to developing a data strategy for the whole organization. That approach should  address the needs of line-of-business teams efficiently and effectively, and it should  be based on leveraging tools that span disparate infrastructure environments…