DataOps Report Breakdown: Decision Making

Welcome back to the 2017 Definitive Data Operations Report MiniSeries!

This week, we will be discussing the various factors driving data and DataOps to become a crucial deciding point when it comes to decision making within many companies.

Do You Feel Empowered?

A growing and important trend in business is empowering all users to access the data they need in order to make decisions in their jobs. For the most part, a majority of data professionals, 67%, agree that business units are empowered to retrieve their own data and perform their own analyses. Only 14% of data professionals disagreed.

Yet when we further examined sentiment by role, only slightly more than half -56%- of data executives (CDOs, CTOs, etc.) agreed BU’s were empowered. A significant 23% of data executives disagreed that their businesses were empowering their users to access data and perform analyses.

This disconnect at the top suggests there are business unit struggles that executives may have insight into, whereas the folks building the data systems think things are working just fine.

data-acces-and-analytics

The Struggle is Still Real

Though it is generally agreed that business units are empowered to perform their own analyses, certain aspects of data retrieval are still challenging. 47% of respondents selected external data and 41% cited internal data as challenges to driving insights in their companies. Despite the sentiment that business units are empowered to access data, the evidence suggests it’s not as easy as it seems.

A lack of analytics and data science skills compounds the problem. Nearly half of respondents cited not having these skills as a challenge to driving insights.

insights-drive-decision-making

Data Execs Feel Unsupported

Much like User Empowerment, our survey found that management support varies dramatically between data professionals and data executives. When asked if they thought their company/manager understood the effort to maintain their DataOps, only 11% of data professionals disagreed whereas a strong 30% of data executives disagreed. This suggests that data executives may not be getting the appropriate support they need to run effective DataOps functions.

Too Much Data, Too Much Work

With management support and business unit empowerment being a struggle for many data executives, it is no surprise that a whole 41% of respondents agreed their current workload is unsustainable. Data leaders are overworked and feel underappreciated.

data execs-are-overworked

However, 67% of data professionals believe their current workload is sustainable–creating a chance for data executives to delegate some tasks in order to alleviate the tension and possible burnout.

Overall, the amount of data growth is pushing data executives to find new ways towards processing and working with their data. Hence why many company decisions are now heavily influenced by the state of their data and DataOps. In order to help data executives solve these problems, it is time to turn towards easier solutions such as Nexla.

Download the full version of the report here.

Read the previous blog post on the DataOps Outlook here.

Read the recap of conclusions here.

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