Perhaps unsurprisingly, 55 percent of all big data spending goes to four business functions that generate and maintain revenue: sales (15.2 percent), marketing (15 percent), customer service (13.3 percent) and R&D/new product development (11.3 percent). Ramaswamy notes that three non-revenue-generating functions get less of the big data spending pie: IT (11.1 percent), finance (7.7 percent) and HR (5 percent).
But while sales and marketing get the lion’s share of the bi data budget (30.2 percent), the highest expected ROI came from the logistics and finance functions. Those functions together only constitute 14.4 percent of the big data budget, but logistics managers said they expected their big data initiatives to generate a 78 percent return, while finance managers expected a return of 69 percent. In comparison, marketing executives expected an ROI of 41 percent on their big data initiatives.