How to Get the Best From Your Data

Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

We live in a digital age where knowledge is power, and we now have the capabilities to gain a vast amount of information that can boost our business at the click of a mouse. The growth in available data has skyrocketed over the past few years, and although data is available, are you using this wealth of information to its optimal potential? No matter what industry you are in, you need to use information smartly to gain benefits to your business.

Why collect data?

Data is collected by businesses to gain a better understanding of how to provide a service of value to their customers, and drive forward efficiency and productivity from within their organization. While this all sounds good, with this knowledge comes an increase of risk of liability should it not be handled correctly and securely. Businesses that are data-driven have the competitive edge over those companies that do not. Companies that recognize the importance of harvesting data, are more likely to succeed and use innovative ways to realize its full potential in terms of productivity.

How to control and manage your data

1. Have strong policies

Your business must implement strong, enforceable policies when it comes to storing data. You want your data to be stored uniformly across the business to be able to get the most from it. You will be able to classify, organize, utilize and track data that is stored to a precedent.

2. Know your data

Your business needs to have a firm understanding of the data that it holds. If you are unsure about where data has come from, where it’s going to, and the value of that information across the business, how can you manage it? You need to assess and classify the information you hold and apply a value to it that will allow you to prioritize how and when you use it.

3. Focus on your information’s infrastructure

It can be easy to get caught up focusing on hardware, software and licenses that you fail to think about how you consume this critical business data. Your infrastructure should best support how you utilize the information to unleash its full potential. You need to make key business decisions based on this information, and so you need to be able to understand what it represents. It is a good idea to consult a firm such as Data Bear who will be able to provide their Power BI Training to achieve optimal data understanding and efficiency.

Organizing your data allows you to increase the control of it, and will also enable you to better utilize it. However your data is currently set up to be stored and analyzed, you need to make sure that your infrastructure is future-proofed, and any design that you are contemplating needs to be designed with the future in mind. You do not know what value will be placed on the data that you currently store, even though you may not yet use it.