Data, Data, Who’s Got the Data?

It happened to me again today. Someone asked me for information that I know I have on my hard drive, somewhere in my archival “system.” All I had to do was find the file and send it to the person and life would be good. How hard can that be?

Instead, I spent 20 minutes searching through my C: drive. Surely, I had put it in a safe place where it was easy to find. Often, I end up with important things archived as email, so I checked my humongous inbox and a few of my large email archives. (I do save everything. Disk storage is cheap.)

Success! I did find the file and sent it to my colleague who was pleased to see it.

I’m sure this has never happened to you. You are organized. You know where all your important documents are and can access them instantly. But for most of us, we struggle with managing data.

Recently, a study of design engineers found that many of them are wasting 20% of their technical time on nonproductive data management tasks. That is one day per week. I was surprised by how large this number was so we asked our customers about this issue. Sure enough, many of them reported similar percentages of wasted time in their teams, so this problem is real. What would you give to improve your engineer’s effectiveness by 20%?

The pressure to get products to market fast never stops. Being first to market is a critical factor in most industries. What we really want and need is to be able to pull insight from our design and test data, to make critical decisions quickly and with confidence. Read my full blog post here.