Author: Clarista – clarista.io
In a recent survey performed by Statista, 300 respondents from Americas, Europe and UK highlighted following as the six leading challenges with using data to drive business value in organizations
1. Data discovery — do not know what data exists
2. Data democratization — not everyone can access the data on their own
3. Siloed data — challenges with sharing data among different groups
4. Data quality — lack of trust in data made available
5. Data compliance — managing role based access and data privacy
6. Skills — lack of analytical skills among employees
Even with increasing focus on data management, why do these challenges still remain? Why organizations continue to struggle to generate meaningful ROI on their data initiatives. In my experience, the reason lies in the lack of interest from people in the organizations to come up with questions that can lead to interesting findings and insights for the organization. Recently, I have started to hear few data leaders highlighting the lack of ‘data literacy’ and ‘data culture’ as reasons behind this weak interest, but is that really true? To most people, these terms do not mean anything, since they cannot translate such terms into something meaningful for their day to day job responsibilities. Essentially, these are not ‘personal’ enough.
I think the solution to create value from anything is much more basic and simpler than many of us would like to believe. We should not forget that day to day life of an employee is quite busy and complex, trying to deal with many direct and indirect job responsibilities. Finding time to do anything new or different has to be personally incentivizing to the people. It starts with making things easier, personalized and sharable.
Why so many people find time during their busy work-day to check or contribute to their favorite social media channels? Because the notifications and content are based on personal preferences, easy to access and easy to share with their network.
Human beings by the nature are curious, love to discover new things and share with others. Unfortunately, we have made Data too hard for most people to discover and to create personalized insights. When people make the time to come up with an interesting question about their business or organizational function, either they are pointed to many different systems (go here for quality and go there for definitions etc.) or it leads to a new project request for data, which in turn requires effort from the idea generator or information requester to justify the need. Most people do not want to take these headaches in their already busy lives.
If organizations truly want their people to drive business value from their data, they need to get away from trying to create a ‘data culture’ to making it very easy for their people to discover, access, personalize and share information and insights. I was so deeply convinced about the need for this change, that I decided to leave my corporate job to launch a SaaS product that can help organizations in taking this new approach.
Clarista™ is the only data analysis software, that tackles 5 out of the 6 challenges outlined above, that are about capabilities. As for the sixth challenge, while we appreciate the need for better analytical skills in the organization, Clarista focuses on empowering people with different levels of analytical skills — from excel users to engineers, by making the steps to discover, access, trust, create and share insights as one smooth process for all. It empowers organizations to focus on what has been proven useful, vs the current approach of upfront heavy investments without knowing the benefits they would yield.
