Market leaders align analytics with strategy

The main uses of data and analytics (D&A) in the next three years will be to enhance corporate performance, link it to the management of risk, and to improve the customer experience, finds a KPMG survey of C-level managers 'Driving Performance while Managing Risk'. Nearly half of the respondents say, analytics will enable the company to take on additional risk in order to plan and implement strategic changes. The survey results show significant differences between the 120 respondents who describe their companies as market leaders and the other 184 respondents who do not.

In fact, 59 percent of market leaders use D&A to connect the management of enterprise risk and performance, compared with only 47 percent of the others. Market leaders are also more than twice as likely to align their D&A initiatives with their strategic objectives and placed twice as much emphasis on using these initiatives in implementing strategic change.

When it comes to the kind of data getting used, companies such as Zurich Insurance, Philips, and Unilever enhance their own data with third-party proprietary data in their D&A initiatives.