Your team can lose 8-9 hours/week to shadow data. And they actually don’t call it that.
They call it “preparing data for analysis.” “Cross-checking against the source.” “Building my own tracker.”
Almost every exported CSV, every duplicated spreadsheet, every manual reconciliation-that’s shadow data. Data that lives outside your governed systems because someone didn’t trust the official source.
The productivity cost can be significant. Research from Accenture shows knowledge workers spend 1.8 hours per day on data-related tasks. Some of that is shadow data work.
But the real cost isn’t just time. It’s decisions made on different versions of truth.
When the sales team has one customer count and finance has another, someone’s wrong. Both will defend their spreadsheet. Neither will question why they needed one.
Shadow data grows when your platform fails one of three tests:
- Timeliness: The data isn’t fresh enough
- Accessibility: It’s too hard to get
- Trust: Nobody believes it’s correct
- Correctness: The official numbers are perceived as wrong
Governance policies won’t fix this. Building a platform people actually use will.
Where does your team go when they don’t trust the dashboard?