Announcing Data Readiness Index for Asia Pacific organizations

In today’s digital economy, disruption has created opportunities abound. Specifically, in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, we’re seeing the potential of businesses in this region to leapfrog to success by leveraging data. Key to this is building capabilities and skills that enable everyone in an organization, regardless of role or level, to leverage data to make better decisions.

One of the organizations that has used data to leap to success is Southeast Asia unicorn, Grab. Once only a ride-sharing company, Grab has grown massively into a company valued at US$14 billion by offering a myriad of digital services. Grab’s success lies in how it uses data; having made data central to decisions at every level of the organization. Creating a culture around data has enabled the business to expand into new markets, refine its current services, and optimize promotions for customers and incentives for partners.

More traditional businesses are also using data to successfully ward off disruption. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Aero Engine Ltd., an aviation engine manufacturer, recognized the value of empowering employees across the organization with data for better business decision-making. The company expanded access to data by empowering every level of the organization to engage with data through Tableau. Their data-driven transformation has enabled them to quickly react to customer demand changes, improve the manufacturing process, and increase product quality. Establishing a culture that valued and practiced using data, was key to their ability to stay competitive in all aspects of their business.

Because of the large opportunities for our customers in the APAC market when they establish data cultures, Tableau recently collaborated with IDC, a leading market intelligence provider, to understand the data readiness of organizations across the region. Through a survey of executives from over 700 organizations in APAC, we sought to understand the investment in and organizational readiness of five data-related priorities: organization-wide collaboration with data, data analysis skill development, analytical tool deployment, data, and content governance, and improving business processes to facilitate data management and data consumption. This led to the development of the Data Readiness Index (DRI).

We analysed these investments against eight different business performance indicators. The DRI findings reveal the criticality of investing in data readiness; organizations leading to data readiness outperform laggards by 90%. Yet, only 20% of organizations surveyed fall in the leading band; the majority of organizations are struggling on the journey to build a data-driven organization.

The DRI also revealed the following:

• Nearly three-quarters of the organizations represented in the leading band of data-ready organizations are from Australia and Singapore. A large majority of the organizations surveyed in each country fall into the leading band (49.5% and 52% respectively).
• India lags behind with only 10% of organizations surveyed from the country in the leading band and the highest share of organizations lagging behind at 30%.
• Businesses are prioritizing investments in people-related factors and process over more complex initiatives that require greater financial investments, like technology and governance.
• Across countries and industries, investments in people ranked as the strongest factors impacting whether organizations were able to translate data readiness into business impact. Specifically, enabling people to collaborate was most highly correlated, followed closely by investments in data analysis skills.

If organizations are to successfully capitalize on the opportunities presented by today’s digital economy, the findings of the survey underscore the need to take a holistic approach to data readiness. While deploying tools across the organization is beneficial, supplementing technology with investment in people and processes is critical. At Tableau, we’ve seen first-hand how our customers, like Grab and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Aero Engine Ltd., have adopted this mindset, created data cultures, and transformed their organizations’ use of data.

This is why we’ve introduced Tableau Blueprint, a strategic framework to help our customers build the capabilities required to become data-driven organizations. Blueprint provides best practices organizations can leverage as they build their core capabilities around data readiness, including how to deploy analytics technology with agility, develop data skills proficiency, build a community to break down data silos, and guidance to help organizations establish a balanced governance of trust and enablement.

Building a data-driven organization is an ongoing journey and we’re incredibly excited to walk this road with our customers here in APAC. There are many more insights surfaced in the DRI Executive Insights paper with breakdowns by company size, industry, and function. We invite you to dive into all the data details here.