Over two-thirds of enterprises fail to exploit valuable data
Despite the fact that data is a key resource for business decision making, a new study reveals that many businesses are leaving it untapped.
The research by Dimensional Research for data integration company Fivetran shows that 44 percent of respondents say that key data is not yet usable for decision making and 68 percent say additional business insights could be extracted from existing data if they only had more time.
Nearly all participants (98 percent) say they have problems building pipelines to access their data. In addition 98 percent of participants say their pipelines break, with 51 percent stating it happens more often than once a month. Respondents who reported pipelines breaking daily cite source availability and data schema changes as being the top reasons.
The result of this is that data engineers spend too much time fixing and maintaining pipelines, rather than focusing on higher-value tasks that generate a positive impact on the business. 66 percent report reduced operational efficiency and 59 percent delayed decisions or lost opportunities due to broken pipelines.
"Data engineers are the forces behind revenue-impacting business decisions, yet they are still burdened by the limitations of brittle, hard-to-maintain data pipelines. Companies should be aware of the challenges these valuable employees face so they can deliver reliable data more easily to business stakeholders," says George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran. "Fivetran provides reliable access to data through fully managed data pipelines and SQL transformations -- with 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime. This allows companies to put data to work and make decisions faster, instead of spending valuable resources on building and maintaining pipelines themselves."
Among other findings are that 79 percent of companies plan to hire more data engineers within the next year. 72 percent of organizations move source data daily or more frequently, and 59 percent of companies use 11 or more data sources.
The survey was conducted ahead of today's Data Engineer Appreciation Day, you can find out more and register for an online event here.
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