Data Preparation between Hype and Reality

Already 68 percent of BI experts state that their company is already using preparation, and one in ten is planning to use it or is experimenting with it. Barc surveyed 360 business intelligence (BI) experts from the DACH region for the study "Data Preparation in the Business Unit - Turning Raw Data into Fuel for Your Company".

The perceived hype surrounding data preparation is based on very real requirements. The study shows that data preparation is primarily intended to increase the performance, flexibility and agility of business departments (52 percent).

Similarly strong drivers for adoption are the goals of properly dealing with current data management challenges (49 percent) and achieving greater competitiveness through analytics (47 percent).

Departments as drivers

These top drivers reflect the desire to recognize changes in general conditions, for example in customers' purchasing behavior, more quickly and to be able to respond to them accordingly.

The main internal drivers of the topic of data preparation are mostly the business departments (55 percent), the IT departments (44 percent) or the BI organizations (40 percent).

Although the usage rate is already high, companies are demonstrably deriving concrete benefits from its use, and expectations are largely even being exceeded, the same cannot be said for satisfaction with implementation.

Here, the respondents probably still see general potential for improvement in data management. The desire for traceability and documentation of transformations stands out clearly with 50 percent of the mentions ("not satisfied") to 19 percent ("satisfied").

Seventy percent of respondents see data preparation tasks for exploratory analytics as the responsibility of business units and 70 percent as the responsibility of IT or BI organizations.

A clear responsibility for data preparation can thus not be diagnosed, but is regulated differently from company to company. This depends on the drivers and goals, the use cases, the available competencies and resources.

Currently mainly simple use cases

The focus of Data Preparation is not on complex processes to prepare for exploratory analytics or Big Data, but rather on support for simple use cases such as enriching and further refining data for analysis.

According to the study, companies most frequently use functions to support data transformations, ensure data quality or data access. High benefits are already being achieved in this area.

Data preparation for data discovery or advanced analytics, on the other hand, is more a requirement of a few specialists. The question therefore remains to what extent the term data preparation is already perceived in the market as a discipline for data preparation for exploratory analytics.

"The democratization of analytics is in full swing. The increasing importance of data for business processes means that as many users as possible in a company must be able to gain insights from data.

But we see a lack of focus on data preparation by management and insufficient strategic embedding of initiatives to systematically use data"

explains Timm Grosser, Senior Analyst at Barc and co-author of the study.

"In order to increase target achievement, it is not only business users and IT that need to work well together. Management must provide the appropriate resources for training or suitable tools and also act more strongly itself as a driver for improvements in the area of analytics.

However, the patent remedy for the organizational anchoring of Data Preparation has not yet been found."