Data analysts spend only half their time analyzing data

During the course of a typical workday, data analysts only spend half their time actually analyzing data according to a new study.

Conducted by Dimensional Research for Fivetran, the online survey of around 500 data professionals across five continents also shows 68 percent of the analysts who responded say they have ideas that would drive more profit for their organizations, but they lack time to implement them.

More than 60 percent of respondents report wasting time waiting for engineering resources several times each month and often spending one-third of every workday just trying to access data. In addition 90 percent say their work was slowed by numerous unreliable data sources over the last 12 months, while 92 percent state they often need to perform tasks outside their role

"The struggles data professionals face in simply doing their work and the time they waste is astounding," says George Fraser, co-founder and CEO of Fivetran. "To keep critical analytics projects moving, these unsung heroes contend with numerous workarounds to compensate for unavailable engineering resources and unreliable data sources. Fivetran ready-to-use connectors help remove some of these bottlenecks and allow analysts to instead focus on uncovering insights."

Among other findings of the study, 71 percent of companies plan to hire more data analysts within the next year, while 74 percent will grow business intelligence users in the same time period.

At the same time though 86 percent struggle due to working with out-of-date data, 41 percent report they had used data that was two months old or older and 60 percent deal with frequently changing data schemas.

You can find out more on the Fivetran blog and there's a summary of the findings in the video below.

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