DMAIPH Quick Data Survey

A few months back I sent a quick survey to 3,000 of my LinkedIn connections who are either analysts or work closely with data and analysis.

Here is the question I asked.

Greetings!  I’m hoping you can help me gather some data for a book I’m working on. If you had to breakdown the work you do into 3 buckets; finding data, analyzing data and reporting data, what would the % of each be? A quick reply with your breakdown would be hugely helpful in my research. Thanks!   Dan Meyer, Analytics Champion, www.dmaiph.com

I got back over 400 replies.

Here is how they broke down.

 

%	Finding	Analyzing	Reporting
10	12%	6%	33%
20	14%	10%	39%
30	20%	31%	24%
40	6%	14%	2%
50	31%	16%	2%
60	14%	18%	0
70	0%	0%	0
80	0%	2%	0
90	0%	0	0
100	0%	0	0

The higher the %, the more each analyst spent time doing that particular phase of analytics.

Here are some of my takeaways from this simple (and very nonscientific survey)

• I was surprised to see 45% spend half their time or more on finding data. To me this is one of the telling signs that Big Data has led to a shortage of top analytics talent.

• Only 1 out of 4 analysts are spending 20% of less of their time finding data. These are generally senior analysts, well established in their company.

• Only half of my analyst connections are spending 40% of more of their time on conducting analysis. With significant time spent on finding and/or reporting data you can imagine a lot of important discoveries are being missed and opportunities lost.

• Only 1 out of 3 analysts are getting spend my recommended 50% or more of their time actually doing analysis work.

• Based on my survey, reporting gets shortchanged a lot. All in, 96% of respondents spend 30% of their time of less on reporting.

• My recommendation is that you spend about 30-40% of your time on the reporting aspect, and sadly only 4% of my analytics connections are able to do that.

In an ideal world, I would expect an analyst to spend no more the 30% of their time on finding data, and at least 30% on reporting their findings, leaving more or less 40% to do the actual analysis.

This breakdown is based on my own experience as an analyst as well as seeing how analyst working for data-driven companies work.

Only about 30% of my 400+ analytics focused LinkedIn connections come close to meeting my recommended breakdowns.

Which means I have a lot of work to do.

Analytics Survey – DMAIPH conducts quarterly analytics surveys to collect data on current trends in analytics. We specialize in surveys that assess analytics culture and measuring how aligned an organization is to using data and analytics  in its decision-making. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out more about how DMAIPH can conduct surveys to help you assess the analytics culture in your business.