Only 21% of data leaders feel they are using data insights to generate more revenue

The Digital Leadership Report 2023 from Nash Squared contained these interesting data points:

Almost two-thirds (64%) of the digital leaders we surveyed think that big data and analytics will be in the top 2 technologies to deliver a competitive advantage in the next year.

Despite this, just 21% of our digital leaders feel that they are ‘very’ or ’extremely’ effective at using data insights to generate more revenue and fewer than a quarter feel they are using it effectively to help guide their product or service offering.

Both of these figures are down compared to last year’s report suggesting that big data is getting bigger in all senses of the word, including its complexity.

That chimes with my note from last week, where I wrote about how data functions struggle to justify their value despite continued investment.

I think we do need to be better at linking our output to outcomes.

If we can’t that directly at a function level, maybe we can do as Josh Singer suggested on LinkedIn and do it at a project level:

Individual projects might have more direct measures. For example, staff time saved via reduction of manual work (i.e. automating a manual reporting process), or new business opportunities identified from exploratory analyses.

Doing that regularly and promote your successes could be a great way to demonstrate the impact of the data function.