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SA struggles with data, analytics

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 29 Aug 2014
Business leaders are struggling to understand data and analytics and how these can drive real business growth, says KPMG's Frank Rizzo.
Business leaders are struggling to understand data and analytics and how these can drive real business growth, says KPMG's Frank Rizzo.

While the global industry has already embraced big data and analytics, South African business leaders are struggling to understand the two concepts and how they can drive business growth, resulting in some not seeing the benefit of data for their organisation.

So says Frank Rizzo, data and analytics lead for KPMG SA, who points out that the big data market is being driven by the increased amount of data the world now deals with. The proliferation of connected devices as well as data being generated from the likes of social media and the Internet of things, has resulted in the exponential increase of real-time data available, says Rizzo.

"Trends such as cloud computing, mobility and social networking are all adding fuel to the fire. And while there is a lot of hype around the sheer volume of data available, the question is: 'how do businesses create opportunities from this data or solve current business problems with this data?'"

A recent International Data Corporation forecast shows that the big data technology and services market will grow at a 27% compound annual growth rate to $32.4 billion through 2017 - or at about six times the growth rate of the overall information and communication technology market.

According to Rizzo, companies in SA are certainly starting to realise the necessity of data and analytics for their business; however, the quality of the data needs to be there first in order for these businesses to get data and analytics right and to find the value of the data that is being analysed.

"While there is certainly a lot of experimentation happening in the South African marketplace around the real-time analysis of data, there have been no massive successes as yet and the local market place is not yet on par with its international counterparts," he says.

To Rizzo, the practical elements around the decision-making process often revolve around whether the decision-maker has the right data from which to make the correct decisions. However, he notes, what often happens is that local organisations are focusing on the amount of data and not whether the actual information gained through this data is of good enough quality to base decisions on.

Local organisations tend to focus too much on the technology and not on the quality of the actual data being analysed, Rizzo adds.

"If the data is not of good quality, the results it provides will be poor and not give the insight needed to make an accurate decision. It is clear that there is a gap in the market to draw out insights from the tools that companies are using. This could very well boil down to a resources issue.

"The reality is that you need people who understand mathematics, science, statistics, technology and business. In line with this, local universities have started offering modules on data science but we are not quite there yet."

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