TOP 5 DATA PREP

METRICS THAT
WILL GET YOUR
CIO'S ATTENTION

As a business analyst, you know the daily

challenges you personally face in preparing data for
use in BI and data discovery tools like IBM Watson
Analytics, Cognos Analytics, Tableau and other
visualization tools. And you deal with the personal
struggle of spending up to 80% of your time dealing
with accessing, cleaning, blending and transforming
data from ever-increasing sources, only to repeat
these same mundane tasks day after day. Couple
this with the likely need to solicit assistance from IT
to gather hard-to-access or protected data, and its
a wonder theres any time left for analysis at all.

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You may already know a http:

self-service
preparation
/ www.datawatch.data
com/our-pl
atform/monarch solution could be the
key to making your job and ITs easier, increasing your value and visibility,
but how can you gain more internal interest and support?
Here are 5 critical data prep metrics that are sure to get the attention of your
CIO and make the case for a self-service data preparation platform.

1
ONLY 12%
of enterprise
data is used
for information
and to make
decisions.*

There are Dark days ahead when it comes to data

analytics. Today only a fraction of your data is leveraged
for analytics, and that unused, Dark Data is growing
800%. According to IDC, up to 90% of big data is dark
data. What is dark data, you ask? Dark data is not only
the transactional data locked away in your ERP,
Mainframe, CMS, or operational reports, but also the
vast amount of semi-structured and unstructured data
in web pages, social media and now machine data and
Internet of Things (IoT) sources.
* The Forrester Wave: Big Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014, February 27, 2014

You know the drill senior management want answers and you get
assigned a new project. You have an idea of what it will take to find
answers, but youll need more than what a custom report can
provide. So you ask IT for data from different systems to
pull into Excel, and your request gets added to their
queue. Instead of being agile and responsive, you
are now at the mercy of the backlog of business
requests that IT is dealing with more and more.
Unfortunately, IT often takes too long to
source your data for insights.
74-77% of

IT orgs take weeks or

longer to turn around requests
for analytics from the business.*
Forrester Technology Adoption Profile, "Faster Data Preparation Unlocks Agility
and Insights" Commissioned By Datawatch, March 2016

60% of big data

projects will fail.

Your company believes in data-driven decisions,

business intelligence and big data. Youve invested in
visualization solutions, BI platforms, data warehouses
or possibly Hadoop. You may even have data
integrations completed and streamlined with access to
critical data sets. Now what? Gartner predicted that
through 2017, 60% of big data projects will fail to go
beyond piloting and experimentation and will be
abandoned. Why?

According to Blue Hill Research, spreadsheets

such as Microsoft Excel or CSV files are still
the most commonly accessed data source of
analysts to accomplish their analytics
objectives. And 79% of data analysts still
use spreadsheets for data preparation. Yet
consider the risk you and your organization
can face if the data used to make critical
business decisions is flawed! Many studies
show that ht88%
tp:/ www.forbes.cof
om/sites/sall
alesforce/2spreadsheets
014/09/13/sorry-spreadsheet-er ors/#351660ba7667 have
significant errors in them. Combine that with
the challenge of importing formatted reports with
repeated headers, empty rows, blank cells, grand
totals, crosstab layouts with multiple pieces of data in a
row, and its apparent why spreadsheets can inhibit agile
data analysis.

Unfortunately, the skills gap in analytics and data

scientists is crippling big data success. A McKinsey
study projected that by 2018, the U.S. alone may face
a 50% to 60% gap between supply and requisite
demand of deep analytic talent. Gartner predicts that
through 2018, 70% of Hadoop deployments will not
meet cost savings and revenue generation objectives
due to skills and integration challenges.

79% of
analysts use
spreadsheets
for analytics.

$22,000 per year,

per analyst.

79% of analysts who began using standalone

solutions or embedded data prep functionality
in addition to spreadsheets or scripting
reported saving time on their data preparation
efforts. James Haight at Blue Hill Research
took a look at the average amount of time
and money spent on inefficient data prep. The
results were approximately two hours wasted
per day on data prep which equates to roughly
$22,000 per year, per analyst spent on low
value-add activity.

Fortunately, a self-service data

preparation tool simplifies data access and
cleansing processes for any business
analyst. Consider the time and headaches
youll save yourself and your IT department by
automating and streamlining your data prep
tasks, reducing your dependency on spreadsheets
and bridging that skills gap with the ability to access,
clean, blend, transform and enrich all of your data
without the need for coding, scripting or IT intervention.
To learn more,
check out a live demo of Datawatch Monarch,
http:/
/www.datawatch.com/resource-center/webinars
the fastest and easiest way for analysts to bring any data
into any analytic tool.

www.datawatch.com
http://www.datawatch.com