Does Your Company Know What to Do with All Its Data?
Raza Sheikh
Author
Jan 31, 2021
Does Your Company Know What to Do with All Its Data?
We’re inundated with new opportunities, more requirements, and more information than ever before. It can be overwhelming to try to keep up with the latest research, the newest software, and the hottest new thing.
The growth of technology over the past few decades has brought companies new strategies to grow their business. Advancements in digital and internet technologies are driving companies toward new platforms for growth. Data is at the core of strategy in today’s data-driven world, but how many businesses know enough about what to do with all of it?
Data is everywhere these days. According to Forbes, only three percent of data is actually analyzed by companies. This means the other 97% lies dormant, and worse yet, might even be unknown or forgotten about by your organization. Some might suggest that data should just be stored for posterity’s sake, but data is meant for more than just exposition. It is meant for action, and in order to take action on your data, you need to understand where it’s all coming from and how it works with others.
The average organization produces about 1.8 exabytes (1.8 x 10 ^ 18 bytes) of structured and unstructured data per day while collecting much more than that. To help you visualize just how large this is, it would be like producing 4.7 GB of data per second!
Does your business know what to do with all of the data you have collected? Data is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today. It seems like everyone is collecting it, but all too often no one knows what to do with it. As a result, large amounts of data are either archived or deleted, having never been used.
Your data management system plays an important role in any organization. Many companies are drowning in data and don't know what to do with it. So, how confident are you that your company's data is being managed sufficiently? How would you assess the current situation? How much of a priority is it to have a good DMS?
Data management systems are a set of technologies and processes that help you maximize the value of your data. That, combined with how it can impact your business operations, should make it a precious tool for your business. What Data Management System are you using? If you are looking to set up a new data management system or looking to migrate check out AI-Surge.
Data management system is an essential system for any organization. It ensures that all data is traceable and accounted for, that tasks can be performed efficiently and effectively.
Data is a company’s most valuable asset. The vast majority of companies, however, lack an effective strategy for acquiring useful data and turning it into actionable knowledge that can impact how they do business or that can provide a basis for decision-making?
Data is…well, it’s like money, if money were bits and bytes instead of paper or precious metals. This means that data can be turned into hard cash and that, as with all forms of capital investment, a business should consider many different ways to put its data to work. There are many types of data: internal logs from your website, consumer purchasing habits, social media sentiment analysis, traffic and revenue statistics for your mobile app, transactional records from your e-commerce site, and much more.
Almost any data—whether generated by your customers, prospects or your own business—can be put to work.
When people think of big data, they immediately conjure up visions of high-flying technology, self-driving cars, and AI robots doing their jobs while we all sit on the beach sipping cocktails and laughing at them. But those things are secondary to the real power of big data. Big data is the future of management—and arguably, it already is today’s management. It’s helping organizations become more efficient, more productive, and smarter in how they go about their work, as well as make better decisions—decisions that allow them to stay competitive in an increasingly challenging business environment.
How can you do that? Well, start with a push for more data accessibility – everyone who needs the data to make decisions should be able to get it. Then, demand better decision-making from your people. A platform that makes it easy for people to access your data and do quick analytics on the data sets in a matter of minutes is an essential part of knowing what to do with your company's data. Allows you to also monitor and manage performance over time.
The Quality of your Company's data is extremely important. It is not just about having data, but the quality of the data is fundamentally important. Without good quality data, it will become very difficult to do any sort of analysis as nothing will make sense.
How do you know the data is better? Making data more relevant means improving how clean/structured it is. Better accuracy comes from improved data validation, as well as maintaining consistent definitions and formatting across inputs and outputs. Then, make better use of big data and the analytical insights it enables — and be prepared to share those insights widely. To do so, a company should make sure that its people are able to run relevant reports without implementing complex architectures or systems. And they have to listen to what their data business-people tell them."
The quality of the data provided is very important. Not just the availability of data, but the quality of the data is fundamentally important. And it is not just about having data but having good data, to begin with. How do you know you have good data? A lot of companies cannot answer this question. Like I stated in my post on Data Visualization, organizations that are able to answer this question will have a big competitive advantage over their competition and already know what works for them and what doesn't work for them. With AI Surge's Data Quality feature you don't have to worry about the quality of your data. You get on the fly and automated Data Quality checks.
A lot of company Data is everywhere, and metrics help us measure our progress and spot opportunities to improve. But how do we know what to measure when? How do we make sure the metrics are meaningful? And how do we share the stories they tell about our organization’s performance with everyone in an impactful way? panies often struggle with decision-making because they make decisions based on the wrong data. For example, I get a lot of insights into what entrepreneurs are measuring that I think is wrong. At one point until recently, a company was tracking pageviews as an indicator of success or failure across their business. Their sales teams would even go to the engineering teams and say “we need more pageviews” and then the engineers would optimize to simply get more clicks on content. This is only relevant if you had a product that sold on a per-click basis, which this company did not have.
Second, share your insights with more people. Operationalize data by building dashboards and reporting tools that everyone can use. Increase the number of people who have access to the data, and give those people the tools to understand it.
Better data means using measurable KPIs that you can track and test. You can use data analysis to determine what’s important to customers and predict future trends. Second, use your newfound data intelligence to make some changes, in order to meet a new goal.
Bad Data + Bad Decisions = Lots of Bad Outcomes
With the rise of Big Data comes a lot of data mining companies. However, it’s important to understand that not all Big Data experts are created equal. Just because you have marketing data doesn’t mean you have Big Data and when you have access to “Big Data” it doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to correctly analyze it. You could throw an elephant into a blender but that doesn’t mean that the elephant is going to come out the other end as a milkshake.
Is the data in your organization well managed and up-to-date? If not, it could be a headache to operate and may have significant impacts on an organization's business functions. Data management is therefore among the most crucial issues for any business. An effective data management system must be flexible enough to adapt to changing business needs and scalable to accommodate an organization's future growth.