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3 Reasons Most Enterprises Aren't Ready For Advanced Analytics Strategies

Dan Ortega

"Data, data everywhere, and not a drop to drink." All businesses are fully aware of how much data they're swimming through on a daily basis. And because its buzzy and trendy, most of these businesses are looking to do more with their data, striving to implement cool sounding technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics.

How many, exactly? 41% of executives in a recent 451 Research survey of advanced analytics are looking to begin implementing applications such as Machine Learning or Predictive Modeling in the next 12 months, and an additional 14% plan to do so in the next 24.

And why shouldn't they? These sophisticated programs are highly efficient and represent the future of many different verticals supported by the technology industry.

Yet as enterprises and their leadership see these initiatives on the horizon, a startling number are overlooking a crucial factor that could make or break the success of these investments: the quality of their own data. With some enterprises curating up to 200 disparate data sources, ensuring data quality is no easy task. But getting it right can literally make the difference between a very public crash 'n' burn, or being the standard that everyone tries to emulate.

Here are three reasons why the average enterprise isn't properly prepared for an advanced analytics strategy.

Reason 1: Medieval Methods for Managing Data Quality

According to the survey, 37% of enterprises employ a manual data cleansing process. Given current data volumes, manually cleaning something isn't so 1990s, it's actually more like 1500s. Many of these enterprises are starting to look towards algorithmic automation – but how can they successfully automate advanced processes when their back-end data quality checks remain manual?

44.5% of respondents are in a reactive mode, meaning they only deal with their data quality when it becomes a problem … that they notice (and by the way, their customers noticed way before they did).

The majority of respondents (65%) acknowledge up to 50% of business value can be lost to poor data quality – think that number is going to decrease when the number of initiatives that rely on clean data increases?

Reason 2: Businesses Don't Know The Exact Quality of Their Data

Because of these current Data Quality Management "strategies", IT departments and C-suite executives have a lack of faith in the actual quality of their data.

Over half (57%) of respondents in this survey were "somewhat confident", "unaware", or "less than confident" in the state of their data. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

This feeling is compounded by the dependency on manual effort to drive remediation in many enterprises' data quality process. Manual entry was the leading cause of poor data quality, also coming in at 57%.

To be fair, you can't blame employees for making mistakes in data entry or processing, but you can blame their management for not providing them with the right tools to handle the volume of data they face every day.

Reason 3: The Stream of Data Today is About to Become a Tsunami

If proper preparations aren't undertaken right now with the relatively manageable amount of data that currently exists, it will be not just be harder, it will be impossible to get a handle on it at the rate that data sources and volumes will continue to expand over the next 3-5 years.

95% of survey respondents acknowledge they expect data to increase (the other 5% presumably in businesses that won't be around in five years).

70% expect data volumes to grow by 70%, while nearly all of the remaining 30% expect it to grow by more than 75%. Chances are, all of them are underestimating what's headed in their direction.

The problems faced by the enterprise today are significant, but can be managed if IT executives deal with the data quality issue now. Tools and technologies are available to ensure viable data quality, which becomes the foundation for growth and value-add, but the choice to act now or quickly get buried is in our collective face, and requires immediate action.

Dan Ortega is VP of Marketing at Blazent.

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3 Reasons Most Enterprises Aren't Ready For Advanced Analytics Strategies

Dan Ortega

"Data, data everywhere, and not a drop to drink." All businesses are fully aware of how much data they're swimming through on a daily basis. And because its buzzy and trendy, most of these businesses are looking to do more with their data, striving to implement cool sounding technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics.

How many, exactly? 41% of executives in a recent 451 Research survey of advanced analytics are looking to begin implementing applications such as Machine Learning or Predictive Modeling in the next 12 months, and an additional 14% plan to do so in the next 24.

And why shouldn't they? These sophisticated programs are highly efficient and represent the future of many different verticals supported by the technology industry.

Yet as enterprises and their leadership see these initiatives on the horizon, a startling number are overlooking a crucial factor that could make or break the success of these investments: the quality of their own data. With some enterprises curating up to 200 disparate data sources, ensuring data quality is no easy task. But getting it right can literally make the difference between a very public crash 'n' burn, or being the standard that everyone tries to emulate.

Here are three reasons why the average enterprise isn't properly prepared for an advanced analytics strategy.

Reason 1: Medieval Methods for Managing Data Quality

According to the survey, 37% of enterprises employ a manual data cleansing process. Given current data volumes, manually cleaning something isn't so 1990s, it's actually more like 1500s. Many of these enterprises are starting to look towards algorithmic automation – but how can they successfully automate advanced processes when their back-end data quality checks remain manual?

44.5% of respondents are in a reactive mode, meaning they only deal with their data quality when it becomes a problem … that they notice (and by the way, their customers noticed way before they did).

The majority of respondents (65%) acknowledge up to 50% of business value can be lost to poor data quality – think that number is going to decrease when the number of initiatives that rely on clean data increases?

Reason 2: Businesses Don't Know The Exact Quality of Their Data

Because of these current Data Quality Management "strategies", IT departments and C-suite executives have a lack of faith in the actual quality of their data.

Over half (57%) of respondents in this survey were "somewhat confident", "unaware", or "less than confident" in the state of their data. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

This feeling is compounded by the dependency on manual effort to drive remediation in many enterprises' data quality process. Manual entry was the leading cause of poor data quality, also coming in at 57%.

To be fair, you can't blame employees for making mistakes in data entry or processing, but you can blame their management for not providing them with the right tools to handle the volume of data they face every day.

Reason 3: The Stream of Data Today is About to Become a Tsunami

If proper preparations aren't undertaken right now with the relatively manageable amount of data that currently exists, it will be not just be harder, it will be impossible to get a handle on it at the rate that data sources and volumes will continue to expand over the next 3-5 years.

95% of survey respondents acknowledge they expect data to increase (the other 5% presumably in businesses that won't be around in five years).

70% expect data volumes to grow by 70%, while nearly all of the remaining 30% expect it to grow by more than 75%. Chances are, all of them are underestimating what's headed in their direction.

The problems faced by the enterprise today are significant, but can be managed if IT executives deal with the data quality issue now. Tools and technologies are available to ensure viable data quality, which becomes the foundation for growth and value-add, but the choice to act now or quickly get buried is in our collective face, and requires immediate action.

Dan Ortega is VP of Marketing at Blazent.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...