Data driven analytics, semantic data, cloud based analytics
Digital innovation is shaping the way most organizations are functioning today and data has become one of the essential elements of its operations. Data is a valuable asset and could be beneficial, but only if we know how to use it.
Organizations today in a rush to collect lot of data. Almost every minute data is collected from different sources. Such as various customer touch points, IOT devices, Web site clicks, social media likes, CRM systems and various other operational systems which are essential for day to day working of the organization. All these systems store their data in various shapes in their respective data stores. Organizations would need to connect these sources to get a holistic view of the data or get insights based on decencies in these systems. This has given rise to the term: Hairball of Data.
It is a complicated jumble of interactions, applications, data and processes that accumulate when organizations are un prepared to handle information from wide range of sources.
Adverse effects of data hairball
This entanglement of data in an organization could cause various challenges and issues. It creates a convoluted mess of interactions, applications, data, and processes that accumulate in a very disorganized way.
Poor Data Quality
Data quality is the measure of how well suited a dataset is to serve a specific purpose. When data is distributed into multiple silos it would be hard to join or relate data across these silos with missing keys and duplicate rows of data, all this resulting in poor data quality.
Lack of Trust
With poor data quality, the insights or inferences gained from the data would lack trust in the organization. It would often lead results to mis-interpretation, inaccuracies and could not be effectively used in decision making.
Missed Opportunities
Apart from data impact, poor data management could have business impact on organizations, such as missed sales opportunities.
Loss of revenue
If poor quality data is used for insights and decision making it would be expensive for an organization and could lead to loss of revenue as well.
The hairball embodies the promise and the threat, simultaneously, of Big Data and digital connections between organizations and customers. Organizations were promised big things when it came to digital channels and data collections, but nobody mentioned the downside of collecting too much data.
Battling the chaos of information, traditional and digital, building up 247/, can be challenging because it makes it difficult for effective data-driven business decisions to be made. The hairball needs to be unraveled so companies can leverage the data, instead of choking on it. This will help to optimize all levels of the organization's operational experiences.
There is good news though, your data is manageable - as everyone knows though, there is no journey that can start without taking those first steps. In the next article I am going to walk through some of the approaches which could be used to untangle the hairball of data and get valuable insights from your data.
