There aren’t that many actions you perform every single day more than just a handful of times, other than say breathing, blinking and the like. These are critical bodily functions that we must do in order to actually go on living.
But what about specific critical actions in the workplace? You know, actions that we must perform in order to keep the business going, alive and healthy. Actions that are especially necessary when dealing with data in a BI environment.
Data Lineage, for example.
Data Lineage: A must for enterprise data analytics
As enterprises rely more and more on their data to make important business decisions, it’s not surprising that Business Intelligence teams and Data Analytics teams who are tasked with finding, preparing, analyzing, comparing, changing, migrating, and/or fixing their organization’s data are performing data lineage more frequently than perhaps any other single action.
Data lineage is what enables these teams to get the whole story behind their data, and actually understand where it came from, how it was created, what changes it underwent, all the different places in which it’s located throughout the data environment etc. So, naturally, if an organization wants to get its data right, and be able to make decisions based on accurate numbers, it better have a robust data lineage tool in place.
This becomes even more important when you consider how long it takes to manually map out data lineage, which is what so many organizations today are still doing. With data scattered throughout your multi-vendor BI landscape(ETL, DWH, Analysis, Reporting), it can take forever to trace a particular data item from source to target. And the accuracy factor? Don’t make us laugh.
It’s all about automated data lineage
The story here is really that enterprise data teams today are sick of manually mapping out their data, and are eager to adopt automated tools that can create data lineage for them, within just a few seconds as opposed to hours, weeks, or even months in some **really horrendous but not so uncommon** cases.
Organizations that have already started leveraging automated data lineage tools are living the life. No joke. Not only are they spending WAY less time manually mapping their data, but they finally have an accurate view of their data, which means the business is able to make decisions that are actually based on truth.
That’s right, T.R.U.T.H. No more fumbling around decisions made based on inaccurate assumptions made on inaccurate data.
Data Lineage ROI for enterprises: Saving the business big bucks and more
OK, now the real reason you clicked on this blog post – you’re interested in knowing what kind of ROI you can expect when getting your team set up with automated data lineage. Well, here goes:
We track our customers’ monthly usage on our data lineage module and the findings are pretty unbelievable. But, believe, for the numbers do not lie.
One of Octopai’s customers conducted 704 data lineage searches in one day. That’s A LOT of searches. But let’s break this down and take a closer look:
Each search conducted saves at the very least 1/2 hour on manual mapping (but usually it’s about six hours!), so we’re talking about a savings of about 352 hours – MINIMUM. Um, whoa. That’s a lot of manpower – especially when you consider one BI team member’s monthly input of 180 hours at an average monthly salary of $15K.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that the 704 searches included some bogus searches like repeated or incomplete searches, so there were really only 300 effective searches conducted in that one day. That’s still 150 hours saved – nearly one month of work, in one day.
Yes, you read that correctly. Automated data lineage is saving our customers one month of work, every day.
