Intelligence. It’s what separates us from animals. We’re capable of gathering knowledge, passing it to others, making sense of it and making it better, taking it to the next level. In the last century, people have gotten to know just how important, gathering intelligence and data is. From banking to military, data is at the core of decisions and planning. Without it, you’re pretty much driving through the fog.
So how can you use data to drive your business decisions? First of all you have to gather it. If you make an early assessment, you’ll find that parts of your business are already gathering data without you knowing it. For example the machines that you use, always generate logs and timestamps of all the activities. Then you want to look at accounting, there’s a lot of data to use there and it’s especially important. Gathering and leveraging financial data is crucial for your business. Financial analysts often use predictive modeling and other analtyics and data modeling processes in order to find insights. Then there’s productivity. Finding out key metrics adn KPI’s for productivity can increase profits by up to 50%. Productivity analysis can be done through gathering usage data of certain software, live measurement, experimenting and other techniques.
After you’ve gathered all this data it’s time to interpret it. Most of the time, when you want to do a data analytics project, the secret is in the gathering. If the data has been correctly gathered then the rest will be a breeze, the data will just interpret itself by pure and simple observations. So the better the data is captured from documents, software, reports and people the better the interpretation will be. There’s a saying: garbage in, garbage out. Giving the data to a specalised data analyst is probably the best idea. Companies doing analytics aren’t cheap, but the ROI will almost always be worth it. 10.000 dollars will most certainly get you 100k. That’s because when you’re spending that much, you’ve probably got a big problem in your company and solving it will make profits surge.
The biggest problem with analytics services is trust. You have to trust the data you’ve gathered, you have to trust your data analyst in order for this to work. Many times CEOs are told things they don’t want to hear. That’s the magic. They tell us what we never thought we would hear, showing us the problem is where we never thought it would be. I’ve heard some spectacular cases of how data analytics solved big problems.
