Data professionals are wasting half of their time each week finding, protecting, or preparing data -costing organisations significant amounts of money based on a survey of 400-plus individuals performing data functions across North America and Europe.

Despite massive growth in data analytics demand globally, this new IDC study The State of Data Discovery and Cataloging , commissioned by Alteryx, shows that there is still much work to be done for organizations to get the most of their data assets and infrastructures, particularly when it comes to data discovery and cataloging. Data professionals are spending more time governing, searching and preparing data than they are on extracting business value.

Among the findings:

• Data professionals spend 60 percent of their time getting to insight, but just 27 percent of that time is spent on actual analysis. Instead, 37 percent of that “getting to insight” time is spent searching for data and 36 percent of that time is spent preparing data.
• These data workers waste 30 percent of their time - on average 14 hours per week - because they cannot find, protect or prepare data. They waste another 20 percent of their time - 10 hours per week – building information assets that already exist. In total, they lose 50 percent of their time every week on unsuccessful activities or repeating efforts.
• Even though data discovery and integrity is important for business, 30 to 50 percent of organizations say they are not where they want to be.

The inefficiencies of data intelligence and knowledge is costing US organisations $US1.7M per year for every 100 employees, and European organisations €1.1M per year for every 100 employees.

“It is evident that many professionals are not aware of what resources are available within data assets like data lakes, how to access the data, where it came from, or how to glean trusted insights,” said Langley Eide, Chief Strategy Officer at Alteryx, Inc.

“Unless organisations make changes to their infrastructure now, and close the gaps on data discovery, integrity and cataloguing, processes will only become more inefficient as data volume and variety continues to grow.”

“Data discovery is important to all aspects of business, from operations efficiency to compliance to risk reduction, revenue growth, and beyond,” said Stewart Bond, Director of Data Integration and Integrity Software Research at IDC.

“Knowledge of how, where and why data is used, by whom, and what information already exists will help data professionals refrain from repeating efforts, increase personal productivity and free-up time for more advanced analytics.”

To download the full IDC InfoBrief, visit www.alteryx.com/idc-data-catalog