Experts have offered fresh insights on the importance of data, saying that it is being recognized, increasingly, as a valuable asset for organisations in their business growth strategy.
Data has the benefits of helping organizations in better, faster and cheaper decision making; ensures better processes in planning and forecasting and also assists in understanding and managing risks.
The experts who gave this hint at a Data Analytics in Finance Webinar organized by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) Nigeria, also noted that data and analytics give more time for stakeholder engagement and business partnering.
They allow greater collaboration across internal teams to solve business problems; give greater assurance on controls and support business growth, pointing out, however, that organizations that are challenged by data usually see their numbers and operations going against the current.
“Data-challenged organizations see slower revenue growth, higher operational costs, delayed time to market, lower customer satisfaction, disengaged workforce and lower valuations,” Simon Driscoll, Head of Data & Intelligence, NTT DATA UK, explained.
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Driscoll highlighted some benefits organizations could derive from data and intelligence which, pointing out however that the greatest challenges to these benefits are “the people aspects rather than the technologies.”
He explained that there are issues of skills and culture gap which means staff aren’t always empowered to contribute to data science projects and don’t understand the importance of data.
Added to this, there is low data literacy on the part of the staff who, according to Driscoll, are not able to ask relevant data questions and the data teams can’t communicate what they’ve done and the benefit to the wider business.
The implication of this is that for a company to make a sense of both data and analytics, the staff have to skill up. “Organisations should adopt data and analytics and everybody in that organization should be up-skilled,” Tony Futohumba, a speaker at the event, advised.
Driscoll noted further that there is always data trust deficit among the staff because, according to him, they don’t trust the data provided to them and, as a result, they create their own data silos. He added that there is even a data strategy misalignment, explaining that strategies are typically created in a silo and are solely technology-focused, hence do not enable the wider business strategy.
The experts pointed out that as whereas data recognised as a valuable asset, analytics is the key to unlocking value. But there are concerns. Despite its usefulness in promoting business growth, many organizations don’t use analytics in their operations.
Clive Webb, ACCA’s global head of Business Management and professional insights explained that finance teams are prevented from using analytics by a variety of factors including lack of knowledge around existing technologies and solutions, and lack of awareness of applications available and what they can do.
