Only 6% of businesses globally use, access, and share data in a way that grants them all the business benefits provided by a robust data strategy, according to new research from Snowflake, the Data Cloud company. Moreover, the report highlighted that only 38% of businesses are in a position to extract value from their data and use it to inform the decisions they make, and just 55% say that data sharing can happen freely in their organization.

The research went on to define ‘Data Economy Leaders’ – characterized by their ability fully unlock the power of their organisations data – and identified that 77% of these businesses experienced annual revenue growth over the past three years, while just 36% of ‘Laggards’ – the lowest-performing businesses surveyed – can say the same. Moreover, 60% of Leaders saw their market share grow over this period, compared to only 31% of Laggards.

“Successful organizations will attain the business advantage that comes from access to data, data services, solutions, and collaboration – which can only be found in the Data Economy”, said Jennifer Belisssent, Principal Data Strategist at Snowflake. “These organizations are capitalizing on data platforms in the cloud. They have strong, data-literate leadership that encourages an enterprise-wide approach to data innovation and have established processes that make their data mutually available. As a result, these forward-thinking organizations are using all that the Data Economy offers to solve the most complex business problems, improve customer experiences, and crackdown on fraud.”

How Organisations are Leveraging Data

42% of organizations surveyed reported that they use data to identify risk and prevent fraud within their business – the most common use for how data is used – demonstrating a growing trend for businesses to use data in a preventative way, to protect themselves and their customers. 41% of organizations use data strategically to launch new revenue streams or pricing models and 40% do so to reveal new market opportunities.

The Road to Data Leadership

The report’s analysis of the Data Economy Leaders revealed several other areas in which these organizations considerably outperform their peers, with their strengths exhibited across three main pillars: people, process, and technology.

People

• Strong leadership is essential if a business is to thrive in the Data Economy. For almost two-thirds (63%) of Data Economy Leaders, there is a C-level mandate to become data forward.

Process

• Leaders are better at aligning data objectives across teams, with 62% having a data or analytics center of excellence that coordinates data policies, and 54% enabling users to access all available data through a single system or application.

Technology

• Twice as many Leaders as Laggards (50% vs. 24%) describe the data storage and management technologies they use as ‘easily scalable and elastic’. Leaders draw upon a greater volume of data, in different forms, while breaking down silos and collaborating with both internal and external partners.

Methodology: The survey was commissioned by Snowflake and was completed in November and December 2021. The 1,000 respondents consisted of C-level business executives and board members and senior technology managers from across eight countries.