Companies in Quebec have been generally slow to leverage the exponential growth of information brought on by a digitized world, said a SAS executive who oversees Canada’s eastern region.
Mario Ianniciello said he’d long sensed there was a challenge in Quebec around understanding and using business intelligence and analytics compared to the rest of the country.
“Quebec likes to look within itself. That’s not to say other provinces or countries are better at this and that Quebec can’t do it,” he said, but for geographic and linguistic reasons, the province has not taken an outward look when it comes to business.
A study conducted by the Toronto-based business intelligence vendor and Leger Marketing proved the hunch, said Ianniciello. The two primary findings were that quantity and quality were issues in data management.
Specifically, the survey found 59 per cent of Quebec executives reported being overwhelmed by information, 78 per cent believed their staff could share information more effectively, and 72 per cent said that having the right tools would help them better analyze data.
Results were based on online surveys with 374 executive-level decision makers from small-to-medium sized businesses and enterprises. Ianniciello said the sample reflected a mix of verticals including government.
Ianniciello said that not only are executives overwhelmed by the plethora of data around them, but the information also tends to get trapped within the individual lines of business. “Everyone has ownership of their data and there doesn’t seem to be a common corporate strategy to share that data,” he said.
While there is an understanding of the value of data sharing across departments like finance, human resources and marketing, the tendency to maintain the status quo often prevails, said Ianniciello.
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