Data is often referred to as “the oil in the digital age” or “the fuel of the future”. In reality, today data is a commodity more valuable than oil.
The question is how can organisations with lesser budgets and resources turn their data into a valuable commodity? In this article we propose steps organisations of any size can take to gain benefit from the data they produce.
To start, document the questions or insights you’d like answered about business. In doing so it will help you focus on key objectives. The field of data analytics is a vast and complex field and an uncoordinated approach will often be met with failure.
Surface your data. It is highly likely that your organisation’s data is siloed. This is to be expected as the current data would serve the organisation’s operational needs. To start gaining insight from data it must be surfaced from operational systems where it can be turned into insights.
Let's consider some of these techniques you may consider to surfacing your data:
Merge your data. Siloed data has an one dimensional perspective. By merging siloed data organisations will start to benefit from correlation in data points. For example correlating a time period vs sales vs email campaigns will provide some valuable insights. Software tools like PowerBI and Tableau enable the curation and blending of your siloed data to provide multi-dimensional insights.
In recent years the cost of these data analytics software has become attainable for even small businesses. PowerBI for example has a free product option and will allow organisations to experiment before having to commit financially. Data analytics skills are also really competitive, especially in the South African landscape. A university intern for example would be able to deliver key insights from your organisational data.
Add intelligence to your data. You may have heard buzzwords like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike many fads, AI is not a hype but will become a necessity for all organisations. In fact the science backing the field of AI dates back hundreds of years.
New innovative services have been created to help both small and large organisations to benefit from machine learning and AI.
The most notable and mature AI as a Service (AIaaS) service offerings are in the e-commerce space. Most major e-commerce platforms have recommendation engine plugins. Also companies like Google and Amazon Web Services all offer AI as a service. A word of caution is that most of these services are marketed as a one size fits all solution. In practical terms, this is unrealistic as business sectors operate differently. Specialist data engineering and sciences skills are required to derive true benefit for your organisation.
Maintain your data pipeline. Oil pipelines have to be secure and efficient to be profitable. The same must apply to data pipelines. To benefit from AI data scientists need access to data. Lots of data. Data has to flow from your various organisational data sources usually into a centralised area for further processing. The data cannot be stale and must be accurate and secured. Again smaller organisations can acquire these tools as the barriers to entry have decreased substantially. The tools we introduced before like Tableau and Power BI allows you to build quite proficient data pipelines.
Data marketplaces offer companies additional data sources to compliment their existing pipelines. Cloud data warehouse company Snowflake’s defines a data marketplace as "... an online transactional location or store that facilitates the buying and selling of data." A common example of data curated from a marketplace would be weather or stock exchange data sets.
In closing, both large and small organisations can turn their data into valuable commodities. Athdown IT Consulting provides technology advisory and training services that can support your organisation in evaluation for the best technology fit and advising on a digital transformation roadmap.