Data Quality Hurdles Keeping CDOs Awake in the Night
Getting data good enough for analysis is now a major headache for chief data officers and data users.
A new research titled “Embracing embedded analytics and a comprehensive data analytics platform” noted that 48% of companies that took part had concerns about using and accessing quality data. In addition, only 7% of surveyed companies said that over half of their employees have access to a data analytics platform.
The research, which surveyed 400 IT and business professionals, was conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group in partnership with InterSystems.
When looking at the reasons why accessing quality data is so hard, the respondents offered three major reasons: security (47%), complexity (38%), and performance (36%).
“Enabling more people to use and benefit from data across an organization sounds straightforward,” said Scott Gnau, head of data platforms at InterSystems. “Yet as the results show, many organizations need to overcome significant challenges on a broad front, ranging from data quality to reliability, speed, and limitations on integrations with underlying data sources.”
To get around these challenges, companies are looking at various initiatives.
In the research, 47% said they are investing in augmented analytics, driving its uptake by 88%. Augmented analytics, sometimes called AutoML, uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate analysis without needing a data scientist.
Half the companies surveyed (50%) also expect to add new features and functionalities to their data analytics platforms in the next year, while 48% will give access to more of their employees to their data analytics platform to drive adoption.
Meanwhile, companies are examining data visualization (44%), data integration (42%), and interactive dashboards and reporting (37%) to make analytics easier.
Gnau saw an opportunity for data platforms that helped companies to explore their data better. “Data platforms that can better enable business users to explore and interact with data on their terms with built-in intelligence improves data literacy and collaboration with peers to improve the business,” he added.
Despite the challenges, the companies are not giving up on making quality data and analytics more accessible for their employees. One reason is that these companies have already seen the benefits of organizationwide data analytics.
More than half of organizations (56%) reported improved technology and employee performance. Fifty-one percent saw improvements in employee productivity when they used embedded analytics, and 49% said it boosted the output of their data teams. Almost half (48%) say they see greater responsiveness to data insights within the business from deploying embedded analytics.
“What these survey results prove is that embedded analytics and the outputs from it will enable employees to do their jobs more effectively, whatever their role,” said Gnau.
“Those data leaders are already realizing the return from their existing analytics investments and see the continued opportunity for more people to use more data to help make the right decisions at the right time for the business,” he added.
Image credit: iStockphoto/fizkes
