Decision-making In the Dark’ a Major Worry for Large Companies

Research recently released from Oracle, and conducted by Dynamic Markets, reveals senior business and IT managers across Europe, U.S., the Middle East and South Africa’s large organizations struggle with a lack of visibility into profits that is impairing financial performance, morale and business success. The research, entitled “Performance Management: An Incomplete Picture,” also highlights the significant issues with the data-gathering processes that are central in creating a dangerous “four-month” data lag. The research, conducted by Dynamic Markets, surveyed 1,499 managers in large organizations in 13 countries across the world.

Click through for results from business intelligence survey, conducted by Dynamic Markets on behalf of Oracle.

Eighty-two percent of businesses admit to not having complete visibility into profits by line of business. Furthermore, 46 percent believe this creates potentially erroneous business decisions, 40 percent feel this can impair financial performance and 38 percent believe it results in flawed business planning that will hamper business success.

Managers typically spend over a third (36 percent) of their week number crunching in spreadsheets. In fact, 82 percent of those involved in scenario planning use spreadsheets to manipulate and investigate data during this task.

Handling data this way means it becomes outdated quickly: On average, data used to make decisions is more than four months old, worse still is that 28 percent of managers do not even know the age of the data they use.

Scenario planning fares little better, with data being typically six months old, with almost a third (30 percent) again not knowing the age of critical data; it is no surprise that 95 percent of respondents involved in this process encounter problems.

It can take nearly a year-and-a-half to identify and amend a failing business process or initiative and 83 percent of companies admit to suffering consequences because of this. One third (33 percent) see plans become obsolete, 55 percent incur unnecessary costs and 43 percent witness a negative impact on employee morale.

Eighty-seven percent of businesses managers criticize their inter-departmental data sharing and communication, with 71 percent describing the links between strategic goals, operational plans and budgets as “fragmented.”