Today’s marketers are taking on responsibilities that go well beyond brand awareness, creating strategies that extend to customer experience, according to a new study by the CMO Council. To accomplish this, however, marketers need access to data from across the organization which is not always available or reliable.

The study entitled, “Doing More with Data: Discovering Data-Accelerated Revenue Traction,” includes the responses from 165 executives from brands including REI, Ryder, IBM and Samsonite.

A full 61 percent of executives surveyed consider themselves to be the owner of customer experience (CX) strategies, 59 percent as a visionary for engagement innovation and opportunity and 55 percent the collector of critical intelligence.

Creating strategies around these key responsibilities relies heavily on access to internal company data—something respondents admitted is not always readily available. Only 20 percent of marketing respondents feel that real-time access to all relevant points of customer insight and data is available to them across the organization.

In fact, 31 percent admit that access to necessary data is more “hit or miss,” varying wildly across functions, partners and their parties. Twelve percent admit that access to critical insights is fairly inaccessible or highly inaccessible.

“Not only are these the data sources that marketers feel are critical to understanding the customer, but they are also believed to be the sources of data that can be put to work to deliver on engagement and experience promises,” notes CMO Council in the report.

The problem may lie in perception. The study found that 21 percent of marketing believes their organization’s current attitude is that data is hard to access and even harder to use. Forty-two percent of supply chain and 37 percent of commerce executives, meanwhile, believe the attitude is that there is just not enough time, budget or patience to unlock the data’s untapped potential.

When asked to identify what could be holding the organization back from realizing the full potential of data, three issues persisted regardless of role within the company. CMO Council refers to these as the “Three Ts.”

The three Ts are Tools, Talent and Time. More than half (53 percent) of all respondents indicate that they do not have the systems to connect data silos and boost accessibility. Nearly half (48 percent) say there are gaps in skills and talent required to utilize data more powerfully. Lastly, it’s the problem that plagues us all—time. A good 45 percent of respondents say there just are not enough hours in the day to address all of the issues and needs that are part of the overarching transformation to activate data.