The world is moving quickly to adopt big data analytics. Business becomes more risky and unstable especially when it shows resistance to change and fails to leverage data and incorporate the new strategies. However, some companies have successfully put in use big data analytics for competitive differentiation in spite of facing data centric barriers like technology, skills and resources. McKinsey & Company states that many companies are still showing their resistance to use data to change. In this competitive environment the need for having consistent strategy to leverage data for analytics and decision making is expected to be an essential requirement for companies like Wall Street and KPMG. Now 24% of the analysts working in these progressive companies are putting in strategy to use data and it is estimated that by 2018, the number will double to 45%. Marshall Toplansky, the managing director of KPMG Advisory claims that among the 6000 odd publicly listed companies in North America, none of the companies are coming forward in incorporating data to their strategic decision making process. The corporate culture is a major obstacle and most companies into modifying their current business model so that they can include data and analytics in their management strategies. He further claims that the decision making is all about making decision different from the competitors. The Data Analytics is all about speed of decision making and not the insights. The input in the structured, semi structured and structured form is put into constructing models and it is correlated with the performance. The Upstart disruptors and mature organizations are using data to form their models which are consistent in nature .However there are still many companies struggling with the data quality and sophistication of analytics. Unless they overcome these challenges, analytics cannot bring competitive differentiation for firms.
