"Data helps us make decisions, foresee the future, classify, segment and find hidden information"

Despite the avalanche of news about how big data has reached companies and organizations, reality contradicts them and only 37.8% of companies consider themselves data-driven organizations, according to a recent study. It seems that data orientation is still a challenge for organizations, despite the fact that great efforts are being made in training and technology that in the next decade should cause a generalization of data-based work to companies.

To analyze this fact, the UPF Barcelona School of Management has hosted the online talk People, key in a data-driven organizations.

Lluís Vicent, director of the Postgraduate course in Data Management UPF-BSM, welcomed the sessions stating that "everything has yet to be done" for those who do data in companies. Vicent wanted to start by defining what the concept of data includes today: "Data is everywhere, we process them constantly, but just a tiny part is processed."

Xavier Gumara, Adevinta's Data Manager and UPF-BSM Postgraduate Professor in Data Management, has continued to comment that data has been used to make "better" decisions in companies since the 80s. "Today there are many more possibilities of using data that also serves us to gain efficiency or make the data itself profitable, its use has changed and expanded ", he stated.

For his part, Marc Llebaria, Partner Development Manager at Microsoft agreed with both: "With mobile devices, businesses have changed and evolved and now the cloud and also the covid accelerates the digital transformation".

"The business of the future will be digital or it will not be at all, and whoever makes the commitment to digital oil will have better results"

Vicent has continued to include these opinions in the fact that computing has increased its capacity and now makes it possible to process data much more quickly. "Data helps us make decisions, foresee the future, classify, segment and even find hidden information," he said.

With this range of possibilities, Gumara has detailed the number of professional profiles that appear: "Before this work was done by statisticians and now this profile has evolved into engineering, analysts and data scientist".

Llebaria explained the sectors where these profiles are most used: "20% of the business associated with data is in the banking sector, retail captures 11% with its digital sales, manufacturing represents 7% and from here on verticals such as pharmacy or the public sector have not yet started. " The profiles in these sectors have a great opportunity: "The business of the future will be digital or it will not be at all, and whoever makes the commitment to digital oil will have better results."