The State of Your Data

Every business aggregates data and has processes in place to do so. Each one has had to make a myriad of decisions about how that data is stored and maintained. 

 

Data is created out of necessity. It may be needed to fulfill orders or capture service requirements, but certainly for accounting and reporting requirements. Given that it is a byproduct of the primary line of work, storage and hardware decisions may not have been approached holistically or strategically. This is understandable as business owners have to focus on the bottom-line. However, it's worth noting that the current working environment is shedding light on the importance of data. More companies wish to be agile in their approach; they want to leverage the insights needed to respond to changes or to develop/adapt their products. This desire is a major driver behind the current hype around AI. People are increasingly aware of the powerful—and sometimes unsettling—things that can be done with human-generated data. The key question many are asking is: How do we get started?

 

The first step is to understand your data. As your technology partner, we would begin with a comprehensive survey of your data landscape. This is a necessary step for further development and exploration. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so the strategy we recommend will be customized to your business’s needs, goals, and budget.

 

Different factors that impact the state of your data include:

• Where and how your data was created

• How long your business has been operating

• Volume and type of data stored

• Quality of the data

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Data is produced and used in vastly diverse ways. This variability highlights the importance of capturing the data-related details within your unique operating environment. Think of it as capturing a snapshot of your existing architecture: 

• Point of data creation

• Data storage

• Data processing needs

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Now let's shift focus to data quality and its importance for accurate reporting and analytic summaries. Consider tthe potential for errors in the data, from its inception. How many times do staff interface with the data from the point of entry into the system until it is aggregated for outputs like invoicing or quarterly reports? Or perhaps it's sourced directly from online forms or software logs, in which case you would have higher volumes of data stored in formats that require software written to retrieve the right attributes from non-relational databases. The quality of the data would depend on how accurately third parties are entering it, and control over it would be limited to placing conditions on the online form fields or software logs themselves. 

 

As you can see, the data will vary greatly depending on the point of entry into the business' memory, how they are produced and where they stored. How does your company initiate service?

 

If your data is reliable, it can be used as a powerful tool to study your business at a more granular level, to explore it through a different lens. These type of insights can promote product development thinking and innovation. 

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In summary, every business generates and stores data. While initial data storage decisions may not have been strategic, the growing emphasis on agility and AI has highlighted the value of high-quality data for insight-driven decisions.

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The first step to leveraging data effectively is to understand its structure, quality, and origins. Key influencing factors include how the data were created, their format and size, as well as the systems used to store and process them.

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A tailored assessment of a company's data landscape is essential, as each business has unique needs and challenges. Data quality, especially at the point of entry, is critical for accurate reporting and analytics. Whether data are entered manually or captured from software, the integrity of inputs directly affects the value of outputs.

Ultimately, reliable data enable businesses to examine their operations more deeply and gain insights that can drive innovation and product development.​

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