A Teradata sponsored survey, carried out by Onepoll, revealed that the UK falls behind on its Big Data utilisation capabilities. The survey involved 300 C-level executives at enterprise companies across the U.K., France and Germany.
Duncan Ross, director of data science at Teradata notes that, instead of a “holistic view of how new data types can be joined to relational data”, IT execs in the UK think of big data in terms of MapReduce and NoSQL. As such, the survey found that British firms are “less creative in the application of data analytics techniques, less innovative in business conception, and more siloed in technology mentality than their continental cousins.”
The OnePoll survey found that 20% of respondents in the UK were using three or more types of new data (text, video, audio, social media, machine data), compared with 48% in France and Germany. Furthermore, the UK is less likely to consider two or more analysis techniques than their counterparts France and Germany (33% compared to 47%).
What’s interesting, however, is the way UK companies perceived their own big data activities. In the UK, 24% of respondents claimed that their analytics were “market-leading” or “truly innovative”, and a quarter described their companies position as “advanced.” These figures are extremely high when compared to Germany and France. Only 17% in Germany considered their company as “advanced”, and 5% thought of their business as “truly innovative” or “market-leading” when it came to new data analytics (this figure was 7% for France).
Ross added that, “We [in the UK] seem to be taking the approach of putting on some MapReduce and a NoSQL database and not doing much analytics afterwards. The use of statistical analysis is low [UK 13%, Germany 49%, France 45%].
The French and Germans, Ross claimed, were ‘taking a more rounded, business-led view of the analysis of big data, rather than getting carried away with the Hadoop technology stack.’
The report also saw that finding employees with technical skills to handle big data was less of a problem for UK companies than for French and German ones; 67% reported problems with skills and tools for new data types in Germany and France compared with 41% in the UK.
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(Image Credit: Moyan Brenn)
