Oracle recently released a study that found many enterprises still have a long way to go before they’re able to fully take advantage of their data. Capgemini’s latest findings supplement this view from a different angle – organizations are increasingly prioritizing big data as an asset, and once realized the bottom line improvements can indeed be very noticeable.

The research firm asked execs and IT insiders about the impact of analytics on their business, and the average improvement in business improvement stands at 26 percent today. This figure is expected to grow to 41 percent in three years, and 58 percent of the respondents said their organizations have plans to invest more in big data during this period.

Capgemini came up with several other statistics. About 65 percent of the respondents said that management decisions are increasingly dependent on “hard analytic information” rather than instinct, which in turn is disproved by 45 percent of the participants.

At the same time, there are still challenges to address. Accessibility is one of the bigger ones: 42 per cent of the execs said that big data analytics slows down decision making within their organizations, and 85 percent blamed it on the lack of real-time delivery.

“The exploitation of Big Data fuels a step change in the quality of business decision-making,” said Paul Nannetti, Global Sales and Portfolio Director, Capgemini. “But it’s not only through harnessing the many new sources of data that organisations can obtain competitive advantage. It’s the ability to quickly and efficiently analyze that data to optimize processes and decision making in real time, that adds the greatest value.

Data quality was named by two thirds of the individuals that Capgemini interviewed as the biggest factor to take into consideration as enterprise make analytics a bigger and bigger part of their decision-making.