If your business is not using data to guide and refine its processes, it’s going to be left behind compared to your competitors. At least, that’s the opinion of most leading market analysts following a decade of exponential growth in the volume and the value of the data that each digital human creates every single day.
Within this milieu of data, your company needs to be savvy in netting the key datasets that matter to your functions, processing it, reformatting it, and presenting findings to the key decision-makers. Below, you’ll learn why that’s so important.
Insights
Data-driven insights are the new consultant – the new business specialist. No longer will you need to refer to the paid services of some of the best in the business when it comes to strategic advice – your data will give you the answers on a plate if you know how to treat it.
Bringing in an individual, or a team, to process your company and customer data is a sure-fire way to get your business making smart and agile decisions based on the wisdom of all the data points that you’ve gathered over the months and years.
Efficiency
Data drives efficiency. If you’re looking at internal data only, you’ll find that some of the processes that take place within your office are not conducted most wisely and effectively. If you look externally, you’ll find that the way that consumers act on your website, and the returning behavior of your existing customers, will give you some key insights that’ll help drive efficiency.
One short example is data’s ability to show us where and how visitors interact with our website – a key nugget of information to pass on to your web designer.
Layers of Information
Your data isn’t just a set of numbers regarding your latest sales or a set of phone numbers of existing customers. You also have a huge amount of metadata attached to your raw data – and it’s within this metadata that you may be able to draw further insights and learnings.
For instance, you may wish to learn to understand the SQL date format to build an idea of the dates during which your company has been trading most effectively. It’s through metadata that you’ll derive that fascinating insight.
Privacy Law
Data, finally, is a resource. Most resources are policed – but it just so happens that data is going to be increasingly heavily policed as consumers wake up to the fact that their privacy is being breached by the current processes by which their data is used, manipulated and sold to third parties.
It is going to be a decade-long movement, but the upshot for your company is that you need to keep in control of your data – or you’ll end up breaching local, national or international law, and you’ll suffer the consequences of that breach.
Data is the most important asset in a company – and this article shows you four reasons why that’s the case now, and for the near future.
