Organizations demonstrate analytics maturity in strategy and data dimensions, but they lack workforce- and process-related analytics capabilities

Delivering fresh insights into Asia Pacific (APAC) enterprises’ ability to create business value from data analytics, Alteryx, Inc., the Analytics Automation company, today released findings from its research report titled, “Toward Analytics Automation in Asia Pacific”. The research, conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) and commissioned by Alteryx, reveals a significant gap between regional enterprises’ business priorities and performance, one that can be bridged by overcoming the lack of workforce- and process-related analytics capabilities.

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According to the research, APAC enterprises’ top business priorities include customer experience, productivity enhancement, cost reduction, new product development and business model innovation. Currently, while more than 90 percent of business executives believe that data analytics are important for their organizations to remain performant, less than one in five (19 percent) enterprises across the region have achieved high analytics maturity. Enterprises that are ‘Analytics Experts’ tend to outperform their peers across all major business priorities, especially in areas like cost reduction (56 percent), business model innovation (28 percent), new product development (17 percent) and market expansion (12 percent).

To help APAC enterprises to determine their analytics maturity level, IDC designed a framework that assesses their standing across four key dimensions – strategy^[1], data^[2], workforce^[3] and process^[4], before providing an aggregated score that identifies Beginners, Practitioners, or Experts. In addition, the framework describes the journey to becoming an Analytics Expert by achieving maturity in strategy, data, workforce, and process.

The research found that enterprises across the region are more mature in strategy and data dimensions, with 48 percent having achieved buy-in and alignment amongst key stakeholders regarding analytics initiatives, but only 38 percent having established policies and practices to ensure data integrity. A large majority, however, lack the necessary workforce (86 percent) and process capabilities (93 percent), which are the most crucial for driving data-driven transformation at scale and deriving long-term business value.

It also suggests that enterprises need to build workforce or process-related capabilities to derive business value from data analytics. In their daily roles, executives across the region currently struggle with hard to use tools (55 percent), scattered and unmanaged tools (49 percent), lack of timely access to data (44 percent), data lineage and integrity (44 percent) and lack of data literacy (43 percent). These challenges are exacerbated by increased complexity and organizational demands for data analytics to be delivered at greater speed and scale, with the average APAC enterprise currently facing internal requests to include 26 new data sources and 30 new data types per month.

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“In today’s volatile, uncertain and challenging business environment, enterprises have expressed the need to invest in mission-critical business areas. In addition, with the evolving needs of customers, enterprises must innovate their business models to meet new needs,” said Julian Quinn, Senior Vice President, APJ, Alteryx. “The findings show a consensus towards the critical role that analytics plays in driving business performance. Yet, organizations are grappling with multiple challenges in using data analytics, uncovering the need to improve workforce and process analytics capabilities. To deliver breakthrough outcomes, organizations need to automate processes and democratize data analytics, elevating workforce’s ability to gain on-demand insights for thriving in their roles.”

“Despite the rapid rate of digital transformation and data generation, many organizations in Asia Pacific are not yet experts in data analytics. They are at the Beginners stage in their workforce and process dimensions which are critical for empowering employees to do their jobs better, faster and with greater impact,” said Dr. Chris Marshall, Associate Vice President, APAC, IDC. “In the face of workforce and process challenges, organizations today can close the gaps with advanced analytics tools. Analytic process automation is a low-code solution that has emerged as a way forward to remove friction, enabling analytics capabilities to scale quickly across the entire organization.”

The research findings also highlight the potential of a self-service, human-centric analytics automation platform to bridge existing workforce and process capability gaps, address analytics challenges faced by executives, and put organizations on a path to become Analytics Experts.

The Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA) Platform™ delivers end-to-end automation of analytics, machine learning and data science processes. As a result, organizations can automate analytics and data science, embed intelligent decisioning, empower its employees to deliver faster, better business outcomes and ultimately, enable the agility needed to accelerate digital transformation.

“Data should no longer sit idly in an organization. With the help of analytics automation, an organization can leverage its best assets – people, processes and data – to empower their workforce to increase overall organizational performance and efficiency so that decision-making is faster and more reliable,” said Quinn.