Mumbai : Skillsoft, a pioneer in cloud based learning solutions, today released findings from its survey titled ‘Leveraging the Power of Big Data and the Cloud’. The report provides key insights about how big data and cloud solutions are affecting organizational learning across Asia Pacific, including India. The supporting survey engaged with companies spread across 13 countries and 20 industrial sectors.

At the outset, the report highlights that 65% of decision makers in India ranked business intelligence as the greatest benefit of leveraging big data. Further, despite low levels of adoption of cloud solutions and big data in some industries, decision makers and learners alike agree that the benefits of both can drive significant and measureable impact for their respective businesses. To supplement that, a whopping 73% of respondents also agreed that more training is needed in relation to cloud solutions to help them perform better in their role.

“No longer can decision makers and business professionals ignore the potential that big data and cloud solutions can impact their business outcomes, their team dynamics, and even their own career advancement.” said Aruna Telang, Manager, Consulting Services – Asia, Skillsoft. “While many decision makers and learners we engaged with categorize themselves as having a limited level of understanding of cloud solutions and/or big data, proactive engagement and the implementation of tailor made learning modules can help organizations move forward and effectively manage their workforce knowledge, growth, capability, and subsequent market expansion.”

Key Findings from the Report: 1. 79% of decision makers believe more training is needed within their organization in relation to big data. 2. 61% stated they were hired to support the process of training employees on cloud solutions. 3. 41% learners stated that they have a limited understanding of big data. 4. 28% learners stated their top concern was knowing how to select the most useful data. 5. While 54% of decision makers are investing in cloud solutions, the research findings showed that 19% of these individuals do not have any budget allocated to training. 6. Across organizations, email systems, customer relationship management (CRM) and learning management systems (LMS) were the hottest cloud solutions being adopted. The Skillsoft report focusses on the decision makers and learners’ views on both cloud solutions and big data and identifies three key areas that form the crux of their understanding of these areas: i) competency and perceptions, ii) budgets and iii) strategy and adoption. The research further reports that 63% of decision makers in India indicated that they have had to create new roles within their organization as part of their adoption strategy for cloud solutions, while only 19% of decision makers surveyed rated their organization as underprepared to harness the power of big data. Measuring the impact/return on investment (ROI) of big data initiatives was the top concern for 51% of decision makers with only 33% of these decision makers wanting to harness big data to make a measurable impact.

“Traditionally, collecting and analyzing market or customer data was limited to the set of tools and structured data sources you had readily available within your organization. However, with big data, you can now blend information from a variety of data sources (e.g. from CRM and social media) to discover new customer segments and behaviours you didn’t know existed. Across organizations in India, it was found that 55% have increased their training budgets related to big data in the last 2 years, while more than 50% planned to allocate at least 11% of their training budget to big data in the coming year. Though IT companies are the front-runners in big data adoption and training, it was surprising to see that education and training sector, as well as finance and banking, appear to be more conservative and have limited budgets for such programs,” said Mr. Vinay Pradhan, Country Manager – India, Skillsoft.

Planning and adoption surrounding big data and cloud solutions seem to exclude the role of learning, as budgets have yet to be allocated to this requirement. Addressing learner needs as it relates to big data and cloud solutions is not only a matter of finding the right courses and subject matter, but providing learners with engaging, dynamic and personalized learning experiences to help guide them through their journey. The research findings highlighted that most decision makers plan to increase their training budgets next year, so it may be time to consider whether your organization is investing enough in learning. However, both decision makers and learners agree that learning is absolutely key to successful adoption, and that more training is needed.