Rethinking The Workplace — A Move Towards Cost Efficiency… But What About Data Efficiency???

Something always seems to be changing… whether it’s the Seasons, work life balance, Remote / Hybrid work, inflation ☹️ — it is never ending! But with change comes evolution and with evolution comes efficiencies, especially in the corporate world, well hopefully!

Speaking of efficiencies, we are seeing more and more statistics published regarding remote / hybrid work, which has been a hot topic of discussion since the Pandemic hit. Employees are maintaining, if not exceeding, their level of productivity at home; their mental and physical health is improving; and their job satisfaction is on the rise, according to an article on the Forbes website. (Source Forbes article — “3 New Studies End Debate Over Effectiveness Of Hybrid And Remote Work”) As more positive statistics / studies are released, remote / hybrid positions are becoming more prevalent across various industries & job roles, remote work is even being advertised in job descriptions as a benefit.

Add these positive stats to the rise of inflation and we are now seeing that companies are increasingly looking to cut costs across the board, either by reducing office space, becoming more efficient, and as we’ve recently seen downsizing their workforce in an effort to save costs. With all of these consistent efforts to create a more efficient organization, why is it that so many organizations have such difficulty applying these same efforts to their data technologies and strategies? Why are we still seeing statistics like this:

“30% of the work week is spent wasted searching for data”

People are constantly saying that data is “everywhere” or that companies have so much data, but while data may be more abundant than ever, access to that data is by no means becoming easier for the people who need to act on the information it provides. Data is consistently being locked behind complex technologies and complicated engineering processes, leading to delays in action and growing frustrations.

For a non-technical user, the process for getting access to the data they need is sometimes a journey (non-efficient) when the company is using traditional (old school) data tools. It starts with submitting a data pull request to a data analyst / scientist / engineer. Now that request is in a queue waiting to be addressed, which could be delayed by several factors:

• Staffing availability (hybrid work schedule, holidays, vacations, sick leave, etc…);
• Vague requests;
• Non-timely responses;
• Incorrect pulls…(I could go on but I think you get the point)

A simple data request could take a significant amount of time, delaying the employee from completing their work. This is not an efficient or effective process when thinking about costs to the company.

What could be done to make this process more efficient? With so many things in the corporate world becoming more flexible and easier to maneuver, why is it so hard to get data requests in near real time for non-technical users?

Why aren’t companies looking at making data more available to all their employees?

Sure not all employees need access to all data but that’s what Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is for! Why not have a solution in place that allows for nontechnical people to browse the data that affects their general day to day activities?

Now I am not suggesting the company needs fewer people, data analysts / scientists / engineers still have a key role to play, and often much larger issues to tackle than data requests; but why aren’t we looking at skipping the “data pull request” back and forth?

If we can skip the middleman — then we can save money and time, it’s that simple!

Enter ClearQuery:

ClearQuery is a full-suite data analytics platform designed with one primary goal in mind — to provide simple, easy to use data analytics for everyone, which includes controlled access to data. ClearQuery enables users of any technical skill level to get answers from their data without ever having to write code or wait for the technical team to respond to a ticket / pull request. ClearQuery can help non-technical users get answers in real time, giving precious time back to the technical team to focus / solve other issues.

ClearQuery enables companies to provide controlled data access to their employees, from there users can:

• View Automated Insights — ClearQuery analyzes the organization’s data and automatically points out key pieces of information, outliers, and interesting facts.
• Ask the dataset questions — Ask ClearQuery allows users to have a conversation with their data through normal english based questions.
• Filter down the raw data.
• Discover relationships within the data — through the Relationship Discovery tool, simply select the fields and ClearQuery shows the users a relationship graphic as well as a table outlining statistics based on the selections.
• Create their own Dashboards.
• Present the data within the tool via Insights Canvas.

By giving users controlled analytical based access to the data directly, companies save time and resources by allowing their employees to explore the data on their own. The days of data pull requests — back and forths are over. Begin the road to empowering your employees through data today, schedule a ClearQuery demo with one of our Account Executives now by clicking here.

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