A Missing Survey Year Is Not a Market Signal

Keep the blank out of the sales forecast

A blank year is a poor foundation for a sales-capacity decision. GTMA proposal: before using a technology-adoption chart to argue that demand stalled, check whether the survey collected that measure in the missing year. Keep an absent observation separate from a measured zero.

What Eurostat actually explains

Eurostat reports that some questions in its enterprise ICT survey are asked every two or three years. This can leave interrupted or shorter time series and empty cells in published tables. That is one documented reason for gaps; it does not explain every blank in every dataset.

The source is survey-methodology documentation, not evidence of demand for your product. The checking routine below is our proposal. It cannot establish why adoption changed between years that do have observations.

A fictional planning slide, corrected

Fictional example: sales leader Maya sees adoption figures for 2021 and 2023, with 2022 blank. Her draft slide says “Demand stalled in 2022” and uses that claim to argue against hiring. She opens the table’s methodology and then the questionnaire for the exact measure and year. In this invented example, the questionnaire confirms the question was omitted in 2022.

Maya removes the unsupported sentence, leaves the cell blank and labels her chart “surveyed years only”. Her planning note reads: “2022 not collected: question omitted. No annual change calculated for that year.” She removes the supposed stall from the hiring rationale; she has not established that hiring is warranted either.

When the reason remains unknown

Start with the table’s metadata link and match the indicator, geography, population and year before relying on a questionnaire or note. Record the exact reference and what it establishes. If those records do not explain the blank, write “missing value: reason unknown”, leave it missing and omit the unsupported trend claim. Do not silently turn it into zero or an interpolated observation.

If the sales decision cannot wait, a useful alternative is to assess current pipeline and workload against your stated hiring criteria, while recording that this survey supplies no observation for the missing year. Assign an owner to resolve the data question. Neither that alternative nor this worksheet is a method validated by Eurostat.

Sources and limits

ICT usage in enterprises: survey methodology and population · Eurostat · 2025-12-11. Eurostat methodology metadata, posted/updated 11 December 2025. Supports only the attributed question-cadence explanation; not a market-demand finding or validation of GTMA’s worksheet.

Source support checked 2026-10-17. Practitioner accounts and proposals are identified in the article; a citation does not turn a suggestion into a proven outcome.