Self-service data preparation technology significantly increases the value of Tableau users to their businesses by freeing them to spend more time on high-value analytics. That is one of several key findings from a survey conducted at the recent Tableau Conference 2015.
Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) polled more than 145 Tableau users at the Conference to get their perspectives on what drives and inhibits productivity in analytics. One of the most recurring complaints was that data preparation is a huge time sink. A vast majority of users (65%) report that they spend more than half of their time preparing data before they are able to focus on their analytic work.
That’s why technology that automates and accelerates the data preparation phase can improve careers, the responses indicate. Approximately 55% of Tableau users say that self-service data preparation technology has increased their value to their organization by 50% or more, and 27% report even greater increases to the value they deliver to their organization by 76% to 100%.
These responses are stunning. Tableau users complain that there is a dearth of tools for getting data in shape and order. But once they discover self-service data prep technology, they report it adds fantastic value because it lets them invest more of their time uncovering insights for their organizations through visual analysis,” said Dan Potter, chief marketing officer at Datawatch. “We believe that data prep should be fast and effortless for all analysts, and the numbers back that up.”
Limited access to data was another significant finding. Approximately 69% of respondents said that they lack access to a quarter or more of the data they need to do their job. And 33% say that more than half of the data they need is inaccessible.
The survey revealed that access to data is constrained by multiple factors. Sometimes security and IT policies make access to data difficult. Other times it is due to the fact that the data they need is locked up in reports, PDFs, log files and other unstructured or multi-structured sources that are difficult to utilize in Tableau.
Here, again, self-service data preparation technology can play a pivotal role by extracting, cleansing, preparing and blending this otherwise unworkable data into high-value data for solving business problems.
Self-service data preparation technology should be able to connect to any kind of data, from multi-structured text reports from enterprise applications to things like web data APIs and streaming data from the Internet of Things. And preparing the data for visual analysis should not take more time than creating the visualizations themselves. This is particularly true for organizations in healthcare, retail, energy and manufacturing, which the survey revealed are most in need of a self-service data prep solution,” Potter said.
Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.
Speak Your Mind