Most business people have probably grasped the importance of using data effectively. The challenge is putting this understanding into practice. With that in mind, here are three tips on how to use data to drive your business.
Get on top of the data you have now
Make a commitment to review your data management regularly. As a minimum, do periodic spot checks once a quarter and a serious review once a year. Bring in an external auditor/consultant every three years. Getting external input is often vital to successful long-term data management. A fresh, knowledgeable, pair of eyes may see what insiders miss.
If you’re sitting on piles of legacy data, then stop ignoring it. Get it into use or delete it. Remember, if data has value to you, it has value to cybercriminals. If it doesn’t have value to you, there is no point in paying storage costs for it. What’s more, even if data doesn’t have value to you it may still have value to cybercriminals.
Review your data analysis tools
Gathering and storing data is only useful if you actually use the data you gather and store. The easier you make it for people to analyse data, the likelier it is that they will do so. This generally means that you want a selection of data analytics tools.
You don’t need to give everyone access to everything. That’s often both inadvisable and expensive. Instead, you need to figure out what individual employees need and deliver it to them. This may involve providing them with training as well as with licences.
In the real world, it may also involve a bit of flexibility and negotiation as well as assertive persuasion. Remember, your employees may perceive established tools like spreadsheets as being perfectly sufficient for their immediate needs. What’s more, they may be right. The issue is that you need more than just “sufficient”. You need the very best tools available today.
Get proactive about data gathering
Gathering data as it comes to you can be very useful. In fact, it’s often highly advisable. Realistically, however, there’s only so far it can take you. The good news is that it is often very easy to get access to relevant data. The even better news is that you can often get this data at little to no cost.
Data gathered by public bodies is likely to be made available for free or at most on an affordable freemium package. Public bodies gather all kinds of data at widely varying intervals. For example, COVID APIs can be close to real-time whereas the census is every 10 years. That said, a lot of census data can be found from other sources in-between times.
You can also undertake your own data-gathering exercises. This can mean anything from social-media polls to formal research groups run on scientific lines. Often, the best data-gathering exercises are semi-formal ones, for example, surveys people are invited to answer.
The value you get from your survey will depend largely on the effectiveness of your questions. If a survey is really important, it can be best to leave the question-setting to the pros. Often, however, you can put together a decent survey yourself with a bit of thought. You can also implement it for free with tools like Google Forms.
