Taking control of data volume in your organisation
“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”, but not necessarily when that thing is data. Having too much can put you in a tricky situation. It can be costly, taking up large amounts of time, operational resources, and money. It can also be confusing and misleading. Too much unorganised data is prone to error and can overwhelm employees who need to interpret it and make data-driven decisions.
Once you’ve got your data under control, the benefits are significant. For example, companies that utilise their customer data are 23 times more likely to attract new customers. And on average, data-driven decision-making helps companies grow more than 30% annually.
If you need to get your data under control, here are three steps to help you:
1.Collect
How you collect your data will depend on your organisation. Its size, sector, sources, and internal skills will all affect how you collect it. For example, if you’re collecting data from diverse sources such as machinery, connected devices, production lines, and shipping routes, then your collection solution will be complex. If you want to transform a slow manual process into an automatic one, your solution will be simpler. Whether you need to collect data from your farm full of smart machines, or your ranks full of taxi drivers there is a business insights solution that can be adopted.
2.Structure
It’s a cliché, but data is like oil. Its value is limited until you’ve refined it.
It’s a given that you’ve got to format your data in a way that will be useful to your business. And it’s important to decide how you’re going structure your data when you start collecting it.
Structuring your data can be difficult. It relies on you identifying the different types of data you have, defining the relationships between them and making a model to reflect that. This task becomes more complex as your organisation acquires and stores more data. Small to medium-sized business manage around 50 terabytes of data. This can grow up to 50% every 18 months. As your organisation integrates data from diverse sources, the structures required to create relationships between them will become increasingly sophisticated.
3.Store
Unruly data needs to be corralled. You need a database or data warehouse to store it. Once it’s got a ‘home’, this can act as a single source of truth for your organisation.
change++ helps many of its clients by creating customised databases and data warehouses. For example, Whitbread PLC needed a database to handle 400 different projects waiting for budget approval. Our solution allows it to attach documents to projects, track them through changes, allocate resources to them and more. Once ready, the system automatically notifies project managers to assess the projects. And it shares the budget data with the finance team.
Under control and unlocked
Once you’ve got your data under control, that’s when you can start realising its rewards.
A self-service analytics system is one way you can drill down into the detailed information you’ve collected and zoom out to see the big-picture trends within your organisation. You can also create hypothetical scenarios, adjusting important parameters, to see how you’ll perform in the future.
Whether you are looking to start your data journey, enhance what you’ve already got or simplify the processes and structures, the data experts at change++ can help you. To address the challenge of data overload, get in touch.
