The 80/20 Rule of Insight Discovery Is Being Broken
Analysts squander 80% of their time wrestling with data and just 20% exploring it. That used to be the rule. But Stewart Bond reports that this rule is starting to be broken. IDC’s December data culture survey found that knowledge workers are spending 28% of their time finding insights. That’s up from, you guessed it, 20% in recent reports.
The new “72/28” rule is a sign that old ways of thinking are crumbling. Leadership changes are helping—Harvard Business Review says that 65% of companies have a Chief Data Officer in 2021, up from 12% in 2012. My favorite example of effective data leadership is how Panera Bread’s data curation culture helped them flip their business model upside-down in under 14 days during the pandemic. CIO John Meister’s vision of “One Panera” helped lead the way.
Smarter tools are helping too. Data virtualization helps break down hoarding silos. Citizen data cataloging and governance tools help anyone find enterprise data. AI and automation help make data trustworthy, accurate, and secure. Hyperconverged analytics bake data and AI into the human experience.
Unfortunately, we have a long way to go. The IDC survey also found that, although we’re spending less time searching, 44% of those searched end in failure. Still, too much data either doesn’t exist or isn’t shared.
The old 80/20 cookie is crumbling. Slowly. Let’s keep breaking the rules.
