As we race to understand so-called “Big Data”, are we truly on top of our own internal “small data” within our companies?

Unfortunately, too many marketers cannot address basic lead-to-revenue questions and assess which campaigns and channels are the most productive and which lead types have the best conversion ratios.

Even if data is aggregated into one place, typically this means it resides in a “report”, which is IT jargon for a bunch of numbers, usually served up in an Excel file, minus any insight, much less recommended actions and predictions or forecasts.

As a result, no one in the sales and marketing organisation can run “what if” scenarios based on what would happen if the lead flow between the stages was accelerated in a bid to understand pipeline velocity and predictability.

This is not a problem restricted to sales and marketing.

Unconnected, undiscovered and unused data litters the ad hoc landscape of most conventional organisations.

“Reports” are usually the result of significant manual efforts, with individiuals required to repeateldy force themselves on to their environments to produce rear-vision, status snap shots which are out of date and irrelevant within days.

We need better, easy-to-use analytics and not old-school “heavy” analytic applications which require significant support and investment.

New generation SaaS tools, such as GoodData, are positioning themselves as data aggregation platforms that integrate with multiple legacy data sources (ERP, CRM, marketing automation and web analytics, etc) to create dynamic, graphical dashboard sources of truth, enabling the genuine monetization of data.

Let’s see how quickly they impact on the BI game and make it real in prime time for business.