The power of data
It is stated that today’s information workers spend as much as 80% of their time gathering information, with only 20% left to analyse it and make a decision. In many organisations, such requests consume significant resources. Too often, Excel Spread Sheets are the prevalent reporting tools with difficulties extracting meaningful information from islands of data residing in separate systems.
Terms such as BI (business intelligence), digital dashboards, enterprise portals, are bounced around with their only purpose being to simply “get out” what was “put in.”
Ironically, despite the important role that reporting plays in today’s enterprise, creating and distributing reports using the above systems have been traditionally painstaking and laborious chores.
To fully benefit from the power of data, organisations need to make it easy for all users to get access to the right data, at the right time. User expectations are demanding self-service access to more types of data than ever before. Any BI solution isn’t complete if it can’t pull in external data, or unstructured data from several places, and easily combine it with existing enterprise data.
To help support and progress data analysis, companies should develop a Data Strategist role. The Data Strategist will regularly pour through data to discover potential improvement areas, gathers information from various sources to help understand a situation and then study the information to find possible solutions.
The Data Strategist will communicate the results of their analysis as a comprehensive report to Executive and/or Board. Reports should be designed so that they can help those involved easily digest the data, such as statistics, maps, graphs, images and lists.
It is important that companies ask what they want from the data before they start the analysis journey.
It is my view that we need to start looking for positive outcomes from the collection of “big data”, metadata or any other type of data, rather than the current negative use of checking compliance or “big brother” is watching you, which seems to be bouncing around today.
Without some positive change in the use of data opportunities could be lost under a covering of fear and mistrust.
