BREAK THE BI BOTTLENECK

Can Big Data Be Frictionless?

If you’re currently waiting for data to analyze or you’re working to find data for a colleague – you’re familiar with one of the productivity challenges associated with getting BI from Big Data.  Finding the right information and provisioning it for analysis and decision-making constitutes a real bottleneck for many organizations.

Friction = Pain

Investments in data lakes and data warehouses - absent tools for analysts and data managers to identify and connect to specific, contextually appropriate data elements – create data friction.  And the friction causes real pain.  In a nutshell, it slows analysis, inhibits complete insight, and produces bottlenecks between BI and IT teams.

Studies across a wide range of BI projects suggest that roughly 64% of any project’s time is spent profiling and identifying data sources.  That’s before any provisioning, any analysis, or any recommendation.  That’s a tall ante to entering the Big Data game. Small wonder Big Data projects are estimated by Gartner to fail nearly 60% of the time.

In his recent post, Turning Big Data Into Big Value, Stephen Baker suggests ways to reduce friction in the data supply chain and provide greater visibility into Big Data repositories.  Accelerate the discovery of the data sources critical to your BI projects and you’ll see higher productivity and better decisions.

Here’s a way to picture both the challenge and the solution.

Ease the Pain

As the graphic suggests, there are three steps guaranteed to reduce the friction that’s taxing your Big Data initiatives. 

• Invest in tools that automate profiling and identification
• Unify isolated sources with a single, comprehensive catalog
• Deploy self-service discovery tools that empower analysts and data managers

Interested in conquering the pain?  Forrester presents a path forward in its whitepaper on Data Discovery (see the Related Resources link below) – well worth your investment in five pages.

Discovering data sources more efficiently, with less friction, is essential to harnessing the promise of Big Data.  If the top half of the graphic seems all too familiar, the bottom half should make you smile.