According to a 2021 MIT Tech Review and Databricks study, “Only 13% of organizations are delivering on their data strategy.” Just 13%!! That’s pretty scary…but is it really surprising? The promise of truly data-driven decision-making — from choosing target markets and clients to prioritizing product and hiring plans — is exciting, but it turns out actually delivering on that promise is really hard. The study cites data architecture as the fundamental culprit and we agree…but the solution may not be what you think.

You see, modern data tools have come a long way – ELT tools like Stitch and FiveTran have made it way easier to access data from disparate systems; data warehouses and data lakes like Databricks and Snowflake have provided low cost, high availability data storage; and BI tools like Tableau and Looker have made it possible to build any visualization you can dream up. Unfortunately, those tools still leave a ton of last mile work to data personnel – the data engineers, data analysts, and data scientists – that need to map, combine and enrich the data to make it useful.

And that’s where things start to break down. Companies can spend literally years working towards alignment of data across teams and platforms. Hiring and retaining highly sought-after data personnel, business users explaining needs to these data personnel, departments clashing over priorities, naming conventions and taxonomies…it’s no wonder only 13% of companies claim to have made it through to the other side.

These are the real-world data challenges that led to the creation of Octane11. We picked a large industry use case – $100M+ Business to Business Enterprises – and we built the last mile layer, which we call “Transformation+”, for that use case alone, so our clients can take advantage of their unified data immediately. We’ve started with Sales and Marketing team data, and we will soon be adding Product, Service, HR and Finance data in the future.

Clients plug the Octane11 platform into their data warehouse or directly into their departmental tools; Octane11 delivers that “Transformation+” step, and then clients can analyze their transformed and enriched data directly within the Octane11 platform or export it back into their data warehouse, third party tools like Salesforce CRM, or the BI tool of their choice.

Of course Octane11 doesn’t solve for every edge case that a client may want to analyze, but we do believe in an 80/20 Pareto Rule where clients can get just about all of what they need for a fraction of the time and cost…and they can still complete that last 20% of analysis using the enriched data delivered from our platform.

Dozens of B2B Sales & Marketing teams are already using data processed by Octane11 to better understand their tactics (What tactics am I running? What companies am I reaching? Am I maximizing efficiency? How can I explain what we’re doing to the wider company?) and to make hard decisions (Which prospects should I prioritize? What content should I reinvest in? What new tools and tactics should I use?) and there’s much more to come.

A 13% success rate for data strategies across enterprises is pretty miserable, but ultimately not surprising given how much work still needs to be done at the last mile. The good news is that companies don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get value from the data they are already collecting. Tools like Octane11 are closing that gap on that last mile and can make enterprise data actionable immediately…and help the remaining 87% of companies deliver on their data strategies in the coming quarters and years.

If you’re a B2B Sales or Marketing leader struggling to make sense of the data in your enterprise, come visit us at www.octane11.com to see how we can help you today!