Sep 10, 2012, 8:30am

An exclusive survey that captures how Fortune 1000 organizations are responding to the Big Data challenge with both immediate and long-term initiatives was issued today by NewVantage Partners, the premier consultancy focused on creating strategic solutions that harness the power of Big Data. With first-hand perspectives from Fortune 1000 C-Suite executives and Federal government leaders, the Big Data Executive Survey provides a rare in-depth look at how some of the most prominent organizations, including American Express, Bank of America, CitiGroup, General Electric (GE), and the U.S. Department of Defense, are managing and funding Big Data initiatives as well as finding the right talent and organizational structure to support new data and analytics innovation.

“Big Data” is a term used to describe the massive amounts of data that, collected over time, becomes difficult to analyze and handle using common database management or analytical tools. With the explosion of social media, video, photos, and unstructured text as well as the data gathered by smart phones and other ubiquitous sensing devices, the average organization will grow their data by 50% this year alone according to Forrester Research. Overall corporate data will grow by a staggering 94 percent – further reinforcing the need for every organization to have a successful Big Data strategy in place by 2013.

For organizations seeking answers to their most pressing data management and analytics problems, the Big Data Executive Survey offers high-level observations and real-world examples of how large organizations are investing in Big Data to improve analytic capabilities and make smarter business decisions. Key findings include:

• 85 percent of organizations already have Big Data initiatives planned or in progress;
• Big Data will fuel a surprisingly broad range of initiatives – in all, 17 different business functions were named as key drivers behind Big Data plans. However, when asked to identify the biggest opportunity for Big Data, over half of the respondents cited gleaning customer insights and improving customer experience;
• Most organizations are focused on managing a wide variety of data, not just increased data volumes, over the next three years. The most important goal for respondents is the ability to analyze diverse data sources and new data types, as opposed to managing very large data sets;
• 80 percent of respondents believe that Big Data initiatives reach across more than one line-of-business or function, yet many are challenged with building organizational alignment for their plans; and,
• Nearly half of all respondents state that they don’t have the right talent or resources internally to drive many data and analytics initiatives. 70 percent state that they plan to hire data scientists but they are finding that there is no reliable source of new talent in this category.

Thomas H. Davenport, Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School, and the author of the highly acclaimed Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, cited by CIO Magazine as one of the all-time “Top 15 Most Groundbreaking Management Books”, recommends the report as necessary reading for business and technology executives.

“This sampling of Big Data activity is one of the few I have seen that focuses on large organizations. It’s very useful in suggesting immediate and longer-term actions for managing this valuable new resource,” said Davenport.

The survey posed 65 in-depth questions designed to provide a useful benchmark for organizations seeking to better understand the state of Big Data initiatives among peer institutions. These questions address issues including:

• How much are enterprises investing in Big Data initiatives?
• Where is the sponsorship and funding for Big Data initiatives coming from?
• What are the initial applications, kinds of data and solutions-approaches that enterprises are employing for their Big Data initiatives?
• Why is Big Data an important initiative?
• Where do organizations stand in terms of the comparative maturity of their Big Data initiatives and their rate of progress?
• Which kinds of enterprises are at the forefront of Big Data capabilities and initiatives?

Over fifty executives from leading Fortune 1000 and large Federal agencies participated in the survey, including Chief Data Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Information Architects, Line-of-Business Heads and senior Function Heads (SVP/VP). Over 30 percent of survey respondents were C-Suite executives.

“Based on our survey findings, we believe that most organizations seek more thoughtful strategies as well as the right talent and organizational structure to fulfill the promise and potential of Big Data,” said Paul Barth, co-founder and managing partner of NewVantage Partners. “Thus far, many of them are still working hard to develop the requisite skills, processes and systems to create coherent, productive data strategies – in their ongoing quest to uncover the right data that enables them to mitigate risk and make bold moves in the future.”

To review the executive summary of the Big Data Executive survey, please go to www.newvantage.com. To obtain the full-text survey, please contact bigdata@newvantage.com.

About NewVantage Partners

NewVantage Partners is the premier consultancy focused on guiding business and technology executives in the creation of strategic solutions that harness the power of their data.

NewVantage Partners brings a history of success to a field fraught with failure. The firm’s Fortune 1000 clients, frustrated by an inability to gain control over their data assets and leverage their latent value, work with NewVantage to mitigate risk and enable bold initiatives.

NewVantage Partners’ team of seasoned Fortune 1000 executives, industry thought-leaders and domain experts in data, analytics and business transformation, employs an integrated business and technology framework to identify and reduce barriers to adoption of critical strategies.

The company is based in Boston with operations in New York and San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.newvantage.com.