The Snaplogic study, ‘Data Distrust‘, was conducted alongside Vanson Bourne, and found a lack of trust in data on the part of IT leaders, despite 98% of respondents reporting that data is reviewed and analysed on a weekly basis by teams across the enterprise.
Even though 82% of organisations view data analytics as very important, inaccuracies have been known to impact insights fed back to users.
84% of companies revealed that data analytics projects are delayed due to data not being in the right format, while for 82%, the data used is of such poor quality that analytics projects need to be reworked.
Lack of trust in the data at the company’s disposal is proving to impact financial and service performance, with 76% reporting missed revenue opportunities, 72% stating customer engagement and satisfaction is negatively impacted, and 68% believing they are slower than competitors to react to market changes.
Out of the respondents that declared little to no trust in data, 54% of strategic decisions continue to use that same data, which brings the risk of flawed decisions and, in turn, hindered progress.
Meanwhile, 64% of IT decision makers believe a lack of trust in data is causing their organisation to move forward cautiously, which has led to missed opportunities that may otherwise put them ahead.
What organisations should expect next in the evolution of data
Rebuilding trust
When asked how data quality could be improved for analysis, the most commonly cited areas were better data cleaning and standardisation, modernisation of infrastructure, and the integration of data silos.
Data silo integration in particular stands out as an important factor, as over half (53%) of respondents called out growing data siloes and inaccessible data as the biggest drivers behind their lack of trust.
Despite the trust gap when it comes to data, analytics has seen increased focus and investment during the Covid-19 pandemic, with 66% of organisations surveyed either continuing or accelerating their warehousing and analytics projects during this period.
“It’s well known that effective use of data analytics can provide significant business advantages. But to know that so many organisations are making business decisions using data they do not trust is alarming,” said Craig Stewart, CTO of SnapLogic.
“To get data analytics projects right, it’s critical that organisations review what data they have, the applications and sources it comes from, and how they are bringing it all together.
“Modern integration tools can help with this, providing an automated way to democratise data throughout the organisation so it’s accessible at the right time in the right format to all those who need it.”
A total of 500 IT decision makers, representing medium and large organisations across the United Kingdom and United States, were surveyed for the study.
