The paper provides details of a detailed survey carried out in five Indian organizations operating in different industries-oil and gas, food products, stock trading, hospitality and industrial chemical. Diversity of industry was maintained to ensure some level of representativeness of the study to the typical India based organization. Study pertained to both the marketing and operations functions and was focused on how business data was managed and used for decision making.
One unique feature about these organizations was that none of them were of the profile of an active Analytics driven organization which would have a natural appetite for data science and data mining output. This was a deliberate strategy to the direct the study beyond the existing boundaries of what is perceived to be an "Analytics focused organization".
The major finding is that unlike popular perceptions, most organizations have a repository of useful information that can be utilized to support decision making. However, there are structural constraints such as top management commitments, culture, internal power and control, perceived value of analysis, near term priorities and exigency that impede organizational capabilities of developing processes for better analytical output. Also, focus seems to be erroneously targeted on analytical techniques and not on evaluating information value to decision making.
