HPE DISCOVER FRANKFURT 2022 — A lack of data maturity is preventing organizations from growing sales or advancing environmental sustainability.

New research shows the average organization’s data maturity level – or ability to create value from data – is 2.6 on a five-point scale. Only 3% of firms are reaching the highest maturity level, according to a survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

HPE’s Antonio Neri

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri commented on the findings. He noted a “broad consensus that the world’s data holds an enormous potential to advance the way we live and work.”

However, unlocking this potential requires a shift in organizations’ digital transformation strategies.

“They must put data at the center of their transformations to close their capability gaps, strengthen their autonomy and enable collaboration across data ecosystems.”

Lack of Data Capabilities Impedes Key Outcomes

The global survey is based on a maturity model developed by HPE that assesses an organization’s ability to create value from data. The lowest maturity level (1) is called “data anarchy.” On this level, data pools are isolated from one another, and are not systematically analyzed to create insights or outcomes. The highest level (5) is “data economics.” At this level, an organization strategically leverages data to drive outcomes. These are based on a unified access to both internal and external data sources which are analyzed with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

Survey results reveal that 14% of organizations are on maturity level 1 (data anarchy). Twenty-nine percent on level 2 (data reporting). Thirty-seven percent on level 3 (data insights). Seventeen percent on level 4 (data centricity). Just 3 % are on level 5 (‘data economics’).

The lack of data capabilities, in turn, limits organizations’ ability to grow sales (30%), innovate (28%), advance customer experience (24%), improve environmental sustainability (21%) and increase internal efficiency (21%).

Organizations Must Close Strategic, Organizational and Technological Gaps

Other findings show that only 13% of organizations say that data strategy is a key part of their corporate strategy.

Almost half of respondents (48%) say their organization allocates either no budget for data initiatives or only occasionally funds data initiatives via the IT budget.

Only 28% of respondents confirmed they have a strategic focus on providing data-driven products or services.

And almost half say their organizations do not use methodologies like machine learning or deep learning. Instead, they rely on spreadsheets (29%) or business intelligence and canned reporting (18%) for data analysis.

Organizations Want Control Across Clouds and Edges

A characteristic of a low data maturity level is that there is no overarching data and analytics architecture. Instead, data is isolated in individual applications or locations. This is the case for 34% of respondents. Only 19% have implemented a central data hub or fabric that provides unified access to real-time data across their organization. Another 8% say this data hub also includes external data sources.

Most respondents (62%) say it’s strategically important to have a high degree of control over their data and the means to create value from data. More than half (52%) are concerned that data monopolies have too much control over their capability to create value from data. Thirty-nine percent are re-evaluating their cloud strategy. This is due to increasing cloud costs (42%), concerns over data security (37%), the need for a more flexible data architecture (37%) and the lack of control over their data (32%).

The findings were announced Wednesday at HPE Discover Frankfurt 2022. There, HPE announced new application, analytics, and developer services for HPE GreenLake. These, it said, enable organizations to drive “a data-first modernization strategy for production workloads across hybrid cloud environments.”

Neri maintained that organizations need hybrid edge-to-cloud architectures where the cloud comes to the data, not the other way around. He added that HPE GreenLake allows organizations to “access, control, protect, govern and unlock the value of data” from edge to cloud.”