Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 39 | Page 25

TRENDING high. Respondents on average have 70% confidence that they can derive business value from their data through analytics. Those that invest in data science talent are more likely to see ROI: confidence rises to 72% for those in analytics roles but drops to 65% for standard IT teams. The same is true when considering the future. Analytics teams are more confident (66%) of their ability to scale to meet future analytics workloads, compared to those in standard IT roles (59%). A total of 59% believe another role of an analytics platform is to have an integrated or centralised data framework, while 43% believe it’s to provide modelling and algorithms for AI and Machine Learning. The responses suggest companies know analytics can help them, but they lack a clear and common understanding of the benefits of using a platform approach across the enterprise and the analytics lifecycle. It would explain why few organisations have a suitable www.intelligentcio.com platform in place according to results from SAS’ Enterprise AI Promise Study announced at Analytics Experience Amsterdam. This revealed only a quarter (24%) of businesses felt they had the right infrastructure in place for AI, while the majority (53%) felt they either needed to update and adapt their current platform or had no specific platform in place to address AI. Despite the wide variety of uses for analytics, confidence in the end result is The research report Here and Now: The need for an analytics platform is the result of a two-part research process. The first phase consisted of in-depth interviews with professionals in 132 business and government organisations across EMEA. These discussions were based on a common set of 15 questions asked of analytics business sponsors, IT decision-makers, heads of analytics and data scientists. The findings from this phase then informed the second part of the research, an online global survey of 477 qualified participants. n INTELLIGENTCIO 25