Data gathering peaked in the big data era, when organizations wanted to get as much information as they could,” says Kristian J. Hammond, professor of computer science at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. “Gathering data is easy, but gathering information is hard. Now in this world of AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning, organizations are thinking about how to mine that data for insight and pushing hard to get really useful information out of it. 

Most organizations are gathering and attempting to use increasing volumes of internal and external data, but some are doing that much more effectively than others, a recent survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found. Onethird of the 311 survey respondents have shown themselves to be data-to-value leaders (“leaders”), as they say their organizations are very effective at harnessing data to create new business value. More than 95% of these leaders have a clear enterprise strategy for managing and extracting value from their data, and for collecting and incorporating external sources of data, versus less than 60% of all other respondents. As a result, these leaders are more connected, more up to date, and more intelligent.