Equans has unveilied, together with L’Usine Nouvelle and L’Usine Digitale (Infopro Digital), the findings of an international study on how organisations create value from data, based on interviews with 980 decision-makers across six countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada). The challenge is no longer only to secure and govern data, but to turn it into a tangible driver of performance.

Key figures – International study

  • 91% of organisations say they have data governance in place: the challenge now lies in real-world implementation and value creation.
  • Only 45% exploit more than half of the data they collect: value remains under-industrialised, despite a widely shared strategic narrative.
  • 61% in the UK and the US say their approach is already operational, versus 46% in France: Europe’s “performance lag” is about execution, not ambition.
  • 59% of organisations in the United States already have a single platform, compared with 38% in France and 29% in the Netherlands: unification is the real engine for scaling.
  • 71% (US) pool data collection across departments, versus 50% (France) and 44% (Netherlands) : maturity is also organisational (breaking silos and enabling internal circulation).
  • AI is accelerating the conversion of data into performance, but it first requires unified, shared data: 54% usage in the United States vs 19% in the Netherlands.

Jérôme Stubler, president of Equans: “This study shows that the issue is no longer only about governing data, but about unlocking tomorrow’s performance from it: cleaning and structuring it so it can be used, analysing it in real time, pooling it across departments, and steering it through relevant, shared indicators to support decision-making. Scaling is what now makes the difference between the English-speaking bloc and continental Europe. For Equans, the challenge is to help our clients unlock the value of their treasures, sometimes hidden, by turning them into concrete use cases. Working on IT/OT integration and then AI, across factories, industrial processes and infrastructure, to boost the competitiveness of both private and public organisations.”