Organizational Alignment is Key to Big Data Success

Fortune 500 companies are rushing to make big data investments. Who is leading this charge? What are they doing? What are best practices and which practices should be avoided? A recent survey of C-level and function heads from Fortune 500 companies offers a unique glimpse into how the captains of industry are thinking about big data and how their companies are changing because of new insights gleaned from big data analyses. Randy Bean, a coauthor of the survey and co-founder of NewVantage Partners which sponsored the study, sat down with MIT SMR executive editor David Kiron to discuss how top executives at some of the largest companies and organizations in the United States are managing big data.

Tell us about the survey and who you focused on.

We conducted the survey in June and July of 2012. It came out of our executive thought leadership breakfast and dinners, where we bring together CIOs, CTOs, chief marketing officers and the chiefs of analytics from Fortune 500 companies.

The survey was biased to organizations we work with. About 53% were financial services firms, which include banking, asset management firms and major credit card companies. Another 19% were insurance firms. If you put those numbers together almost three-quarters of survey participants were from some form of financial services firms.

All of the respondents were senior executives in the c-suite or a level or two below. So, this was a unique perspective on what top executives in very large companies are thinking about big data. We had XX executives complete a really detailed set of 65 questions.

Part of the motivation for doing the survey was that we had heard from many of those surveyed that they wanted to know what their peers were doing in terms of big data. Was big data a real phenomenon across their industry? What kinds of investments were organizations making in big data? What type of applications were they looking at? And did they have the people to execute big data initiatives or did they go find these people?