Data Marketplace: Costco for the Chief Data Office

Even Fortune 500 companies face challenges when making data widely accessible to constituents. All too often, organizations lack protocols to be able to accurately track who is using data and for what purpose. A large defense contractor described a daily challenge faced by its analytics community of some 600+ data analysts and scientists, who were spending 14% of their time searching for information to complete simple tasks such as report creation, metric calculation, and model testing. No organization in the industry can claim they have a scorecard of 100% when it comes data accessibility and usability.

The data office at this customer took up the responsibility to specifically dissect the analytics challenge, and, more importantly, created a tangible metric to outline the dollar impact on the firm. Here are the 4 simple steps they followed:

Step 1: Survey Methodology

They had everyone in the analytics community take a one-question survey, which simply asked:

“How much time do you spend finding information to complete (insert task name)"

• 10 - 20 percent
• 20 - 40 percent
• 40 - 60 percent
• 60 - 80 percent
• Other ________

Step 2: Qualitative Analysis of the Survey Results

Results showed that on average, the analytics community spent 14% of their time finding information to complete a given task.

Step 3: Cross Comparison of the Survey Results with Salary Average

They ran reports to determine the average salary for the 600+ employees in the analytics community.

Step 4: Generate Impact Assessment Report to Support the Business Case

The results showed that the average individual in this survey was making $100,000 in annual salary. For 600 individuals, this meant the organization was spending at least $60 million annually, and when you calculate 14% of that amount (the results of the survey shared above) that meant the organization was spending $8.4 million dollars every year just finding information. Calculating this figure lead to the creation of a business case for the team to look for external solutions that would bridge the gap for the community and eventually scale across the enterprise to include other business lines and functions.

How can Informatica help?

With a history of more than 25 years and a global community of 5,000 active customers, Informatica has been addressing needs like these and more for organizations of all sizes, from small startups to large established enterprises and everything in between. For example, we have customers like Nissan where data democratization is at the heart of its growth strategy. With over 500TB of data in their data lake, the company is executing aggressive plans to make data accessible to the analytics community.

A key highlight of the Informatica solution is the Axon Data Marketplace. Simply defined, the Axon Data Marketplace provides an e-commerce-like data shopping experience for data owners and consumers. It’s almost like walking into a Costco store and seeing how each aisle supplies different items for various customer needs. With Axon Data Marketplace, organizations have full flexibility to organize, create, or publish data for data consumers to access. The data owners can then track who has access to which data and to what purpose (aka Service Level Agreements or Data Usage Agreements). Finally, the ability to auto-provision data access, whether through integration with external ticketing systems or using Informatica’s native data provision solution.

For reference, here is a quick summary of the Axon Data Marketplace:

Informatica has helped many customers—from small businesses to large enterprises—with common challenges, which include making data freely accessible, ensuring that data is trustworthy in terms of its quality, and applying scalable privacy controls.

Beyond Data Analytics: here are other business drivers that Informatica has addressed:

If you face a similar challenge, we can show how the Axon Data Marketplace can help accelerate your journey with data, and more importantly, how you can increase productivity for data teams who would otherwise spend a good chunk of their time finding data.

Click here to sign up for the Axon Data Marketplace webinar, “Unleash the Power of Creating Value with Trusted Information,” presented by Ian Stahl, our Senior Director of Product Management.