Disconnected data is an obstacle to efficiency within organisations. This is according to research that found that, on average, workers believe their organisation would see a 28% increase in efficiency if all necessary data were better integrated. Toni Sekinah investigates.
Nine out of ten workers think that it would be essential or beneficial for their organisation to make efforts to connect data, applications and systems and enable them to get their work done more efficiently. Six out of ten said that projects are consistently delayed by slow data integration and 64% said that data gaps in their organisation are impeding its ability to be more productive.
The research also found that a lot of time is being dedicated to transferring data across systems. Workers in the US spent 35 minutes daily on this task while those in the UK spend 28 minutes. On average, this is 32 minutes a day which mountain up to 19 days a year.
The research was carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of data integration company, SnapLogic. Five hundred people were interviewed, split evenly between IT decision makers and business users of cloud-based or externally-hosted applications. Three hundred respondents were from the US with the remainder from the UK.
Gaurav Dhillon, founder and CEO of SnapLogic, told DataIQ that the problem was greater than he was expecting. He said: “I don’t think we were quite prepared for the scale of the problem. We were pretty shocked. Nineteen days a year. It’s an insane amount of time being wasted.”
He said that, in the business world, speed and agility are key and SnapLogic’s customers know that not being able to access and analyse data quickly will lead to them being left behind. “Our customers have moved away from legacy systems and instead are opting for more modern, flexible, self-service platforms that get integrations done in a fraction of the time. Faster time to integration allows them to focus instead on more strategic initiatives and business outcomes,” he stated.
Dhillon added that, by using self-service integration functionality, companies would be able to improve their efficiency in a matter of days or weeks. He gave the example of Box, an online file storage company. Instead of taking five to six hours to push 150,000 records to an external endpoint, it was able to push three times that volume of information to the external endpoint in about two minutes.
