Fujitsu Unveils New Online Tool and Consultancy to Help Organizations Assess Readiness for Data-Driven Transformation

Completing the online tool takes only a few minutes and provides a comparison of performance against other businesses, as well as tailored tips on where an organization should focus to drive further improvements. The tool, which can also be completed working with Fujitsu’s consultants, is based on a methodology developed for Fujitsu by industry research firm Freeform Dynamics. It positions participants against competitors within a four-stage data maturity journey that runs from being data-starved, to data sustained, then data-empowered and finally through to data-driven. When the model was applied earlier this year across over 400 international organizations¹, it revealed that the large majority are still on their data-maturity journey, with just one in 20 (4.8%) being genuinely data-driven.

Data is the basis for successful digital transformation
Data-driven transformation will also be a key theme at ActivateNow, Fujitsu’s flagship thought-leadership digital event for 2020, taking place on October 14 and 15. The importance of data as the foundation of digital transformation is now increasingly understood by business leaders, with data-driven businesses able to exploit data at every level to achieve both strategic and operational advantage. Analytics is routinely thought of as the silver bullet to generate revenue from data but, once organizations dig deeper, they soon discover a range of more complex issues around their transformation projects.

Christian Leutner, VP and Head of Product Sales Europe at Fujitsu says: “Fujitsu’s new online data-maturity assessment is a valuable tool. It enables executives seeking an objective, independent measurement of progress towards becoming the data-driven organization that is vital to flourish in today’s digital environment. This is important, because there can often be a mismatch here between perception and reality. When we recently asked businesses to judge their own evolution, a surprising 63% said they are already at the data-driven endpoint – against the 5% that research commissioned by Fujitsu shows to be really the case. Being able to demonstrate the gap between internal belief and what is really happening is an essential first step to overcome some of the most difficult hurdles preventing change, such as cultural resistance, internal politics and lack of senior ‘air cover’.”

Almost all organizations capture large volumes of mainly unstructured data – including word processing documents, video and audio files, email and images. Much of this is generated at high speed by a variety of sources, across many locations and in different ownerships. Analysts predict that by 2022, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, rising to 75% by 2025.

However, without a systematic framework, this data is little more than a morass of unconnected information. Monetizing data within a digital transformation strategy cannot be delivered without first streamlining and integrating data across the organization and its entire value chain.

Fujitsu’s new online assessment tool and consultancy offer help business strategists understand how far their organization is along the road to becoming a fully data-driven business. Feedback is structured in four areas: culture and mindset, user experience, data management and systems and infrastructure, which reflect key information- and analytics-related imperatives.

Notes to editors

¹ The Freeform Dynamics research was undertaken in June 2020 among 400 businesses in Austria, Benelux, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Business size was split equally between those with more than 5,000 employees, and those with between 1,000 and 4,999 employees. https://www.fujitsu.com/global/microsite/data-transformation/infographic/index.html