Three Steps to Turn Data into an Indispensable Strategic Tool

Data can only be powerful when it is put to work. However, making data usable isn't always straightforward as it doesn’t come pre-packaged into customer next best actions and strategic tips. In fact, data analysis is often compared to panning for gold. Not all data is useful and you need to connect the dots to make it relevant - when you consider the volume of data managed by the average company has grown to 162.9TB, that’s one big river to pan.

Ultimately, if data is not handled in the right way, the quality of the results suffer. Receiving uncleansed or even accurate data that is misaligned to its intended use can render insights unreliable or unusable - ‘garbage in equals garbage out’. But, once a business gets control of its data, and understands that different use cases have different data requirements, the possibilities for making data driven-decisions are endless.

Acting on data won’t exactly be a leap of faith if businesses lay the groundwork, decide what they want to achieve, cleanse and enrich data, and apply an analytics layer to dig deeper. At a time when countless industries face huge challenges and disruption, data-driven decision making has never been more mission-critical. As the rallying cries from the government and industry bodies get louder, increasing numbers of businesses will be putting their data to use, so it’s time to start drawing insights and taking action, or risk falling behind.