Editorial

Public sector and the data decision gap

New research shows that 93 percent of the public sector lack rich data-driven approaches to operational decisions

Posted 11 November 2021 by Christine Horton


The public sector is struggling with the ‘data decision gap’ – an inability to use data to make accurate and trusted decisions.

New research shows that 93 percent of the public sector lack rich data-driven approaches to operational decisions. Forty-six percent face regulatory scrutiny and/or compliance issues due to their data management approach.

Elsewhere, 56 percent of the UK public sector face reputational issues due to their data management approach.

The findings come from a global report by data and analytics software company, Quantexa. It is based on interviews with 750 IT and data decision makers in the financial services, insurance and public sectors, across three continents.

Across the board the research shows that organisations suffer as they can not bring together the internal and external data needed to make decisions. This is due to inaccurate and incomplete datasets, which ultimately impact the bottom line.

Inevitably, strategic and operational decisions suffer when they are based on a poor and incomplete picture. Quantexa’s study finds half of strategic decisions are missing crucial intelligence because organisations can’t take full advantage of data. Only slightly better for operational decisions, just 52% manage to rely on data.

Data in the spotlight

“The pandemic put data in the spotlight,” said Vishal Marria, CEO and founder of Quantexa. “Digitisation has meant organizations face an increasing tsunami of data, and many found they couldn’t take strategic advantage of the opportunity that connected data brings. Today’s organizations have all the data assets they need to make better decisions, but the data decision gap means they can’t extract meaning or value out of their data, as they can’t connect it to generate the single, accurate view needed.”


The report follows research released earlier this week that shows that people in the UK feel overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them when making critical decisions at work.

The study found that while people believe they have the data to be successful, they are overwhelmed by data quantity and plan to turn to a robot or machine to assist in the decision-making process during the next 12 months.