What is real-time information? It’s a phrase that sits at the heart of our business: We exist to deliver relevant, real-time information to the world’s largest companies, news organizations, nonprofits and government agencies.
At Dataminr, we strive to deliver actionable, real-time information about an event as close to when it occurs as possible. A new survey of risk and compliance professionals suggests that there’s still persistent misconceptions about real-time information, with more than half of respondents saying they’d define real-time information as data delivered today, this week, or this month.
The survey, commissioned by Dataminr and conducted by Forrester Consulting, covered 410 professionals who are responsible for managing risk and compliance at companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue and based in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. It was conducted in November 2020.
Asked to define real-time information, the answers ranged from seconds to months:
- 8% of respondents said real-time information was data from the past few seconds
- 8% of respondents said real-time information was data from the past few minutes
- 9% of respondents said real-time information was data from the past few hours
- 22% of respondents said real-time information was data from today
- 20% of respondents said real-time information was data from this week
- 21% of respondents said real-time information was data from this month
- 12% of respondents said real-time information was data from this quarter
For risk and compliance professionals, real-time information appears to be a concept that’s synonymous with “recent,” with 53 percent saying they’d consider week-old information to be “real-time.”
At Dataminr, we believe that relevant, actionable information must be delivered faster.
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The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this challenge perfectly—consider a large retailer, with hundreds of stores and thousands of employees spread out across the country. How does the retailer remain in compliance with a sometimes conflicting patchwork of local, state and federal health mandates? Dataminr’s real-time information platform can deliver alerts on new health mandates within seconds of them being publicly announced.
Real-time information is similarly important during a rapidly developing crisis. The survey found a little over half of companies use real-time information to identify high-impact events or emerging risks. But just 30 percent of respondents said they used real-time information to take action.
Not surprisingly, companies that had an accurate definition of real-time information (data delivered within seconds or minutes of an event) said they were getting more value out of that data than their peers:
- 60% of respondents with an accurate definition of real-time information say they use it to continuously monitor existing risks, compared to 46% of respondents with an inaccurate definition
- 37% of respondents with an accurate definition of real-time information say they feel very confident their organization has the technologies to obtain an early view of unexpected events, compared to 27% of respondents with an inaccurate definition
- 34% of respondents with an accurate definition of real-time information say they feel very confident their organization can derive insights from real-time information to make an effective response, compared to 22% of respondents with an inaccurate definition
How do you define real-time information at your company? Are you confident that you have access to the data you need to make better-informed business decisions? Read the full study here, and feel free to reach out to chat with us about how access to faster information might help your organization.
