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.
According to Jean-François Ouellet, marketing professor at the Business School HEC de Montreal, there may have been a time when businesses could manage the then-moderate amounts of data utilizing a rudimentary “non-scientific” approach. But today, he said, that “gut feel basically becomes drowned under this sea of information.”
There are observable symptoms for when an executive is overwhelmed by data. Ouellet suggested that if 10 per cent of a person’s time is spent trying to figure out information based on data they have, “it’s a good indication they are being submerged.”
More qualitatively, however, an executive in that state will let “emotions take over, reason gives way to emotion, and that’s very bad when you’re conducting business.”
Companies in Quebec are generally unaware of the available business intelligence technologies on the market, as evidenced by interactions with customers in the province, said Ianniciello. “And it’s so fundamental… this is not a new invention.”
Catching on to the benefits of business intelligence to reap better business decisions, he said, will present an economic advantage to the province. And that’s particularly vital now, as businesses in Quebec begin to interact more globally.
“If you’re looking for growth, you’re going to be saturated by the population that we have here. So at some point you need to look for growth outside of Quebec.”