Disconnected data is a drag on innovation

3 min read

By Scott Behles

What do you consider to be a business’ most valuable asset? Is it the cash it holds? Product inventory? Property perhaps? In the pre-internet age, these traditional assets may have supported businesses and could be easily accounted for on an organization’s balance sheet, but the lifeblood of the 21st-century organization is, without question, data.

Whether it’s customer data, financial data, or increasingly machine data, the insights that can be gleaned from an organization’s data repository are invaluable in developing new products and services, deciding the future roadmap for a business, and gaining competitive advantage.

But are businesses taking full advantage of the data at their fingertips? Particularly in larger enterprises with multiple departments, global offices, and disparate IT systems, data often remains relegated to the department that is considered its primary owner. The finance department handles the accounting data while customer data stays with the marketing and sales teams, for instance.

It’s an antiquated way of handling things, and one that means company leaders and other business decision makers rarely see the full picture of what’s going on across the organization, leading to stifled innovation, unforeseen market threats, and missed opportunities.

Convincing business leaders that this is a serious problem can be a tough sell though. Unless you can assign a dollar figure to how significantly disconnected data is negatively impacting a business, you’ll likely not get much of a reaction.

Thankfully, our new Disconnected Data research has done just that.

We surveyed 500 businesses users and IT decision makers in large businesses across the US and UK and found that the wasted time and resources, duplication of work, and missed opportunities caused by disconnected data is collectively costing businesses $140 billion annually.

That stat alone might raise eyebrows, but when we dug a little deeper we uncovered that this issue in large businesses is likely having a far greater impact.

First, more than one-fifth were unaware of what data other departments actually held and one in six didn’t even know how many data sources actually existed. Against this backdrop, it’s even more surprising to learn that, on average, workers were spending more time searching for, acquiring, entering, or moving data than actually analyzing and making decisions on the data. Workers spending most of their time collecting some but not all data, and at the expense of possibly not incorporating it into their decision-making, paints less than a rosy picture for large businesses’ data-driven strategies.

To their credit, most of our respondents are aware of this problem. More than half (57%) admitted that their organization is struggling with data silos and nearly the same percentage said that data silos are a barrier to meeting their organization’s business objectives.

The business objectives most affected? Seizing new opportunities and driving innovation. A shocking 72% felt that siloed data was causing their business to miss out on opportunities, and a third stated that it was holding back innovation in product and services.

For us here at SnapLogic, that last stat is the real stinger. We firmly believe that innovation should be priority #1 for any business that wants to succeed and thrive in today’s fast-moving digital era. Without innovation, products and services won’t evolve which means customers won’t benefit from the latest developments and will start to look elsewhere. If a business can’t innovate, then its days are numbered. If disconnected data is standing in the way of that innovation, it’s a problem that must be solved. And quickly.

To read our complete study on “The High Cost of Disconnected Data,” to get all the details.

Scott Behles is Head of Corporate Communications at SnapLogic. Follow him on Twitter @sbehles

Former Head of Corporate Communications at SnapLogic
Category: Data

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