Data-Driven Analytics & Best Practices for Your Business

Big Data Analytics is no longer a technology, but the premise for your business strategy. Combining the insights attained from the analytics with your big corporate goals, you can achieve greater heights, scale your business, and improve your performance. The data-driven strategies help you win a war waged against your competitors, and hold your competitive edge.

When it comes to incorporating Big Data to your business, you need to have a highly competent strategy in place, one that can help you attain your goals while securing your business needs. Data for the businesses come from all shores available, which is why you need to tame the data and identify ones that suit your purpose best. Your enterprise should have the capabilities to actually optimize this data and come out with the necessary predictive and analysis models that can help you unleash the power of this data. Finally, you need to have a decision making model that is transpired from this model to improve the conduct of your business to improve the returns.

As an organization that is working with data-driven analytics for your business, you need to realize a few things and incorporate a few best practices. This will help you yield better returns.

For a truly business driven data analytics, here are best practices that you ought to follow.

Think your Questions
Before sourcing the data, it is important to start thinking the questions that you aim for the data to answer. Data analytics is an answer to the questions that determine your business strategy. You need to question what exactly drives the demand for your product or service. Check for price and availability (raw materials, other related industry products) that will change or evolve with time. Regional factors and the role they play in the sales of your products or services. Forecasts and predictions, how do they affect your business? These are the questions that the data for your business needs to answer. Basically, you need to combine your data with your business in order to make it relevant to your needs.

Identify your Data Sources
You need to find the best data sources that can help you answer the questions to your data. There is a whole load of data available at this moment, which is increasing by seconds. Opportunities available with the data are also ever evolving, which is why you need to not only choose your data carefully but also make sure you are working with the right data sources. When choosing data sources, you should take both panoramic and granular views of your business setup with an aim to improve operations, experiences and define winning strategies. Historical data is just an aspect that businesses should consider; beyond that businesses should look into data that gives them a purview into external factors.

Document Data
When you are planning to align data analytics with your business, it is a good practice to document the data and make it discoverable. There will be times when you have data that you didn't know would be useful to the business. Documenting it would make it available to you at all times. Apart from documentation, making it discoverable helps you search and locate the data at just the right time. A data catalogue with all the right labels and marks will help you identify the data, and use it appropriately at the right time. Source of the data and source-within-a-source of the data is also revealed with the documented data. This helps in availing a data just in time to make critical business decisions.

Check for Data Quality
Many times you end up using data that has not been checked for quality. How can you make reliable decisions with such data? You need a data quality manager who can check into the quality of the data, and suggest if this data can be used or not. The data needs to be continuously audited for the quality of information, and incorporating the metrics that will help in identifying how recent and useful the information in the data is. The idea is to make sure the information is same through the various reporting systems.

Automate Decision Making
Once you have standardized the data, and ensured it is centralized and available in real-time, the next task is to automate decision making to make sure you don't cause delay in taking critical decisions. The idea is to make the insights available in real-time in a constant manner, thus suiting decision making. The data-driven businesses are repetitive, automated and systematic in nature, ensuring no response delay and improving efficiency of the systems.

Engage Key Decision Makers
Last but certainly not the least, you should engage key decision makers by showcasing progress, using visual analytics. The person whose decision matters should be engaged early on so that critical decision making is possible without any interruption. Expert feedback, similar decisions and available data sources can help the key decision makers in thinking about their decisions and enhancing upon them. The evolving nature of data and business requires continuous feedback from experts.

Seashore Partners aligns business needs with strategic goals and data analytics to drive your business towards profits. We have experience of working out capable Big Data solutions that earnestly work towards helping your business grow. Connect with us to take this conversation further and help you define analytics' solutions for your business.