Technology keeps evolving and changing on a daily basis and at the same time data; You hear of terms like a data warehouse, data analytics, big data, data science, data visualisation, to some people they might just be buzz words.
When the word data comes up the technically minded individuals might think of ones and zeros, binary or even digital format while the business inclined might look at data regarding customer numbers, sales, revenue, employee performance, and cost.
Data has been at the centre of organisational decision-making process aiding companies in the process for a very long time. By transforming your data into knowledge and actionable intelligence, organisations have been able to harness the power of their data. This activity drives the processes, methodology known as business intelligence which aids the decision-making process in organisations. Organisations facing competition have been forced to collect, decipher and harness their data to support the decision-making process through actionable intelligence to improve business operations.
Take time out
As an organization have you taken time out to define what your data vision is for your business and organization?
Is your plan to store the data in a Data warehouse and wait for a time when you would have an extensive business intelligence program before your start to analyze the data?
Is your vision to wait for the data to accumulate without making any plans about monetizing data?
Are you looking beyond now and gazing into the future?
The Change
The evolution of technology has allowed for the massive amounts of data that couldn’t be stored in the past to be stored now. You probably have heard of big data. Big data deals with data that couldn’t be stored in a format that enabled analysis previously, but can now be stored, retrieved and analysed; data mainly of the unstructured variety. Data is useless if it does not have business value. Big data offers a new direction in providing significant business value. Big data enables you to go digital with your business. Moreover, the possibilities and new business use cases keep growing by the minute made possible by big data technology.
The world’s population keeps growing so imagine more people with devices that are connected spewing out more information by the second and the data keeps getting bigger. Data today certainly isn’t data of tomorrow. Big data today maybe biggest data tomorrow or just fast data.
The Key
Let’s face it; data is key to unlocking information that drives business results and also in helping to the formulation and implementation strategies. Not having a data vision might just be very costly to your business in the long run. If you wait, you might just end up playing catch up with your competition. You might know about the fast second theory by Markides and Gerosk which opines how companies come into the market second and they dominate the market despite being the second entrant and take over the market. As an incumbent, it would be great to see the numbers and fight off competition rather than be displaced and struggle to get back on top?
Data is an intangible asset, it might not go on your financial balance sheet as a line item like cars or capital expenditure, etc., but it is an asset none the less.
Businesses need to sweat their data assets because it holds the key to your future with insights on your customers, market, business pressures and opportunities and even competition; it is a good plan to have a vision for your data.
