IDC Infobrief: State of Data Science and Analytics

Data is the lifeblood of digital transformation. 80% of organizations leverage data across multiple organizational processes. Survey respondents in this paper indicate that data is being used across all business functions such as product management, customer acquisitions and retention, supply chain logistics, fraud / risk, R&D, customer service, finance, HR and many more.

With over 54 million data workers worldwide spending 90% of their work week focused on data related activities such as preparation, searching, analytics, data science and data app dev. As much as 44% of time is being wasted every week because data workers are unsuccessful in their activities – with 51% of that time spent in searching followed by 47% time spent in preparation.

The key findings this paper outlines in data science and analytics are:

• Data is becoming increasingly important to success in the digital economy
• Data workers spend the majority of their work week on data activities
• Complexity, diversity and scale are tops challenges for data workers, resulting in inefficiencies and wasted time
• Users resort to the ubiquitous spreadsheet in face of complexity
• People and organizations are still resistant to change