2017 is fast approaching, and with it comes the hope and promise that only a new year can bring. If you’re at all like me, you’ve already started making a mental list of things you’d like to improve in your life. I mean, let’s face it, there’s always room to better your health, your career or just your overall happiness, right? (Unless you’re Tom Brady of course, and I can say that because I’m from New England.)
As I was making my list of resolutions for 2017, I couldn’t help but notice how they might also apply to improved data prep and analytics. Think about it: healthy reporting is happy reporting, especially when you can access all the data you need, when you need it. So before you dismiss the idea and say that data prep resolutions, like regular resolutions, are often too hard to keep, consider the many ways you can get there by taking a new approach:

Get healthy. Admit it. You found yourself rekeying data more times than you’d like in 2016, didn’t you? Not only could you have entered incorrect information, that data may be used to make erroneous business decisions which could negatively impact your organization’s bottom line. With a self-service data prep tool, you can eliminate the manual rekeying of data. You can also gather and consolidate information from a wide variety of sources and append diverse data with ease all while providing transparency and auditability. The result? Healthier, more accurate data at your fingertips and throughout your business.

Learn something new. Feed your mind and go to the head of the class this year by learning about the latest innovations and use cases for self-service data prep. datapreparation.com is the #1 source of how-to videos, tips and advice on data preparation. You’ll find literature, advice and access to our online Data Prep School for training and helpful tutorials.

Work smarter, not harder. Do you have too much work to do and not enough hours in the day? I can relate. It’s said that 80% of an analyst’s time is spent on data prep. You can add more value to your organization in the coming year with a self-service data prep solution, helping you to spend less time preparing data so you can spend more time analyzing it. In addition, instead of waiting on IT to assist you with data prep activities, create your own meaningful dashboards and visualizations. The user-friendly interface in Monarch, for example, allows you to manipulate, filter, enrich, blend and combine data from disparate sets easily and quickly. You’ll also be able to collaborate and share best practices with colleagues for repeatable data prep processes.

Spend less, save more. Looking to save your pennies in the new year? Then it’s time to get on board with a data prep solution. Did you know the cost of a data prep solution is less than the combined salaries of the team you’d need to hire to manage your data prep? Blue Hill Research suggested an annual cost assigned to just data prep activities to be approximately $220,000 for 10 analysts. That figure does not include the cost of actual analysis. Don’t go outside of your 2017 budget. Empower your current workforce to use existing data to make informed decisions with self-service data prep and reduce new salary expenditures by giving more power to the people.

Devote more time to family and friends. Are you spending late nights and weekends doing data prep and manually reentering data from paper files and PDFs? It’s time to break that bad habit. Make the task of data prep less time-consuming by quickly and easily acquiring and preparing data locked away in previously inaccessible multi-structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources, such as text reports, web pages, PDFs, JSON and log files. With the ability to retrieve and use not only the right data, but all of the data required to get the whole story, you can focus on performing analysis that will result in timely, more informed business decisions and better operational processes.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Stay tuned for next week’s post where I’ll provide even more examples of how you can easily resolve to have happier, healthier reporting in 2017.