For this year’s Analytics and Data Science Leaders Outlook study, we surveyed 61 analytics leaders in India, ranging from Chief Analytics Officer, head of Data Science, Director & VP’s of Analytics. With this study we aim to get an idea of the overall sentiment around analytics and data science industry in India, and leaders’ opinions about where they see analytics industry developments going in the year 2018.
It covers the viewpoints of leaders around how they would predict the growth in their own organisation, their hiring plans, growth areas that they would focus on, and many more. Sentiment analysis are an effective indicator to get an idea on how the industry is going to fare in the coming year.
This is the fourth year of our in-depth survey on analytics and data science leaders’ outlook, and here are the results.
Read: Analytics & Data Science Leaders Outlook in India – 2017
All respondents expect the demand of Analytics at their organization to increase over the next 12 months. Thus, the sentiment outlook within the industry continues to be at a high. This result is consistent from last year.
Next, we asked the leaders to rate on a scale of 1-10, if they are confident on analytics being a key focus area for organizations globally over next 12 months –
- 62% leaders gave a perfect 10/10 score. This is much higher than 36% from last year and 47% from 2016.
- Average Confidence score was 9.38/10; higher than 8.7/10 in 2017 and with 2015 score of 9.0/10.
Also, we computed the Net Sentiment Score (Calculated as difference of % respondents with score of 10s & 9s and % respondents with score from 0 through 6s).
- Net Sentiment Score among analytics leaders in India is at a four year high of 80%. Last year score was at 51%.
- Overall, Analytics leaders in India exhibit a strong positive outlook towards the industry this year.
- 90% of decision makers plan to increase their analytics workforce in next 12 months. This is higher than 87% from 2017 and lower than 94% from 2016.
- 10% leaders say that their current analytics strength would remain same for the coming year.
Key Challenges
- ‘Unavailability of Analytics Talent’ continues to be the biggest challenge faced by Data Science Leaders in India.
- 70% decision makers believe that ‘Unavailability of Analytics Talent’ is the major challenge that they face. The percentage is almost same from last year at 66%.
- 49% of leaders believe that ‘Little knowledge of analytics among customers’ is a major challenge for them. This too remain the same from last year at 45%, though dropped significantly from 2016/15 at 58%.
- “Procedures/ Processes not standardized” is the third largest challenge faced by the analytics decision makers. Almost 44% of leaders believe to face this as a biggest hindrance to their business.
- Few leaders are wary of competition; just 11% believe it’s a challenge for them (down from 15% last year).
- Only 11% believe that analytics demand has peaked, almost same as 13% last year.
- The biggest change in challenges faced is for “Analytics as a discipline has not grown in offerings”. 11% believe it to be a challenge, down from 23% from last year.
Growth Area
We asked our respondent on what according to them are the biggest growth industries for analytics in next 12 months.
- ‘Digital/ Online/ Mobile/ Social’ is considered to be the top area of growth in analytics. 65% respondents believe this to be the top growth area, which is higher than 2017 results of 55%.
- ‘IOT / Sensor/ Predictive Maintenance’ follows at 58%, down from 66% in 2017 & 69% in 2016.
- ‘Geospatial/ Images/ Videos’ saw the biggest increase this year: from 37% respondents in 2017 claiming it to be biggest growth area, to almost 53% this year.
- ‘Pharma/ Healthcare’ & ‘BR/ Talent/ People’ was a drop as growth areas this year.
Key strategic decisions
We asked our respondents on the key strategy decisions that they plan for the coming year in order to grow their business.
- 72% analytics leaders plan to collaborate with external partners.
- 69% are planning to grow their existing offerings.
% of Advanced Analytics
We asked an added question, on how the analytics organizations for these leaders are composed in terms of executing advanced analytics projects. We asked our respondents the percentage of work in their organization that involves advanced analytics.
Analytics leaders claimed that in 2018, 42% of the analytics work is in the area of Advanced/ predictive analytics/ modeling. This is exactly the same as last year.
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