Hardly anything runs without data

Data is becoming increasingly important for companies in all industries. For 85 percent of companies in Germany with 50 or more employees, data use is already very important or rather important. And as many as 91 percent are convinced that data use will be of great importance in two years' time.

That is the result of a survey of 503 companies with 50 or more employees conducted by the digital association Bitkom. "Only those who have data and use it sensibly will be economically successful in the future," says Bitkom President Achim Berg. "Legal requirements in data protection and antitrust law must be designed in such a way that innovative business models also have room to develop."

The vast majority of companies collect, analyze and use data internally, with just eight percent stating that they do not do so. However, in the majority of companies, this data is only used for simple analyses. For example, three quarters (74 percent) of companies collect, analyze and use data to support staff deployment, and two thirds (64 percent) for financial planning and liquidity management.

But only a minority of 27 percent rely on data for predictive maintenance, and only 15 percent use data for simulations of operations or model calculations to drive adaptation processes. And just eight percent use data for research purposes.

According to the companies, there are two main ways to facilitate the use of data within their own companies: firstly, corporate cooperation (48 percent), and secondly, the expansion of open data approaches (42 percent), in which the public sector makes available existing weather or traffic data, for example.

One in four companies (23 percent) would like to see the establishment of a European data ecosystem, and around one in five (18 percent) would like to see the expansion and promotion of data markets. Bringing up the rear among the helpful measures is the introduction of a legally secured right to access data from other companies, which 13 percent support.