Dive Brief:

• Most executives at large companies say they feel their corporate Big Data strategies are directionally correct, but they still struggle to connect the dots, according to a new survey.

• Only 23% of the 150 executives with at least 5,000 employees surveyed by Attivio say their company has been successful at leveraging Big Data to make decisions.

• Regardless, the vast majority of executives say their company plans to increase their investments in all things Big Data over the next five years.

Dive Insight:

While 98% of respondents said their company "encourages employees to ground business decisions in data," they also admitted they often face challenges making that happen.

Data accessibility is a common challenge. Of the respondents, 41% said that data is too siloed to be easily accessed, while 37% said it can take a day or more to access their Big Data sources.

"This survey underscores exactly why chief data officers now have a seat at the executive table," said Stephen Baker, CEO of Attivio. "Enterprises are competing on an incomplete view of their data; they cannot adequately see or unify data across their silos."

Most companies use only a fraction of the Big Data resources available to them, according to the study. Only 23% of respondents said their companies uses more than three-quarters of their Big Data.

The Big Data and analytics market is expected to continue its rapid growth over the next several years. IDC recently predicted the Big Data market would be worth $187 billion by 2019, up from $122 billion last year.

Companies are using Big Data and analytics in a number of ways, from identifying risk and fraud, to helping improve productivity to creating product insights companies can act on.