The Significance of Data Optimization During Covid-19 Pandemic

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article | The Significance of Data Optimization During Covid-19 Pandemic | Data Optimization | Data ManagementUntil recently, very few CEOs, IT, or marketing professionals would have put ‘data optimization’ high on the list of agenda items that keep them up at night. These days — and by my estimation — this notion has become a top priority for the majority of businesses. Given the impact of events surrounding COVID-19, I view this not a matter of if, but when decision makers also arrive at this conclusion.

The simple fact is that businesses need to be able to build trusted relationships with their customers beyond the physical spaces represented by storefronts and square footage. As ironic as that sounds, what distinguishes data is its human factor. Interpreting and making decisions based on data during a time when competitors are trying to capture the attention of their consumers is vital.

Today, amid a global pandemic and subsequent overhaul of how businesses access and interface with their customers, we find ourselves suddenly competing on a level playing field that is the attention of a phone, computer, or TV. No foot traffic, no event, launch, or experience — just time and attention on a screen, and it’s the ones who have optimized their data who are winning.

Here are a few tentpoles to consider points of entry towards optimizing your data:

The Customer

The modern customer has high expectations and demands that enterprises strive to achieve — at all costs. A business with quality data optimization services has comprehensive information that is customer-centered, dynamic, and always available.

As a result, there is a real-time ability to address all customer demands without going through a complicated, costly, or time-consuming process. Naturally, as customers become more aggressive in having their requirements met, your business stays a step ahead of competitors, when it comes to availing quick and accurate solutions. The most critical aspect of better data management is the reduction of inefficiencies in operations that cost businesses as much as 25% of their revenue. This is because enterprises with better control over their data reduce the potential of making mistakes. As a result, their trustworthiness among customers in any niche industry grows, and they become seen as market leaders.

Direct Sources

Long gone are the days when e-commerce strategy meant focusing only on SEO. Mike Ewing, a Customer Success Strategy & Operations Manager, writes on Hubspot, ”if you rely on free/direct sources of traffic, you are fighting shared losses. Direct has gone from 75% to 9% over the last ten years, while e-commerce has been growing 15-25%.”

Today, you need to find a way to seamlessly integrate direct traffic, transaction data, demographic data, paid search, comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, mobile, and social media. That’s a lot! Each medium comes with its own tools, database, and strategies — only by combining all can your business stay on top of your competition… and crush your topline goals and quotas.

Bottom line: Your products and services should be where your clients are.

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Speed

The data modern enterprises depend upon may have many different sources and a variety of structured and unstructured formats. In many cases, the data will contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, redundant information, or other anomalies that make it unnecessarily difficult to access critical information in a timely and comprehensive fashion.

The data optimization process makes use of sophisticated data quality tools that help to access, organize, and cleanse data — whatever the source — to maximize the speed and comprehensiveness with which pertinent information can be extracted, analyzed, and put to use. That enhanced availability of critical information provides businesses with significant benefits.

Data optimization helps business leaders understand and improve their business processes so that they can reduce the wastage of time and money. Consider the information age, a time and place where consumers expect to get fast, accurate, and comprehensive information from the business they are dealing with.

Embracing Data

Amid the panic and unrest of a rapidly changing COVID-19 environment, business leaders in the trenches must lean in to leverage all tools to make themselves more digitally enabled… if for no other reason than to maintain their relationship with their customers during times when human contact is not an option.

We must all consider new ways to bring the human factor into decisions around data optimization. The time is now.

About the Author

Megan Silva is a data optimization leader and advocate. Over the course of her 15-year career in data, Megan has led numerous business and process improvement initiatives, with an emphasis and focus on increased capabilities and decreased costs. She is best known for her leadership on measurable and scalable results, defining customer journeys, aligning content for automated campaigns, and improving contact and data strategy. Megan holds a Master of Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A Quick Beginners Guide To Analytics in 2020

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Analytics|A Quick Beginners Guide To Analytics in 2020If you know anything about analytics, it’s probably that you should be looking at them regularly to decipher what is working for your business and what isn’t. Using these stats and figures, you can make sure that your business is always doing the right thing and can get the best results. The only thing is, many people don’t think that analytics are all that easy to understand. In fact, they can be quite intimidating.

Below, we’ll talk you through a few things quickly so you can have a better idea of what you should be looking at:

Is It Free?

There are multiple ways you can check your analytics. Google Analytics, for example, has both paid and free versions. If you are a small or medium sized business, then you should be fine with the free version. You will get more support with the paid version, however. Start by creating your account and add the URL and industry, as well as the name of the site you’d like to track. You will then get your custom code that you add after the head tag of your site.

You can check it’s all working by visiting the “Real-Time reports” section while clicking around on your site in a different tab or on your phone. You only need to add the tag to every page template, not every individual page on your site.

Other Kinds Of Analytics

Of course, there are other kinds of analytics that you should consider looking at depending on what kind of business you are. PetroBase is one such example – you can use this service to check your analytics in the oil and gas industry. There’s no one size fits all guide to checking analytics, which is why it’s so important to understand what is important to your own business.

Analytics That May Be Helpful To All Businesses/Industries

The Real Time Report

This tells you what is happening on your site right now, showing you visitors, the pages they are looking at, the platforms they came from, where they are, and so on. This is probably the least valuable metric to look at, so don’t be fooled into thinking you should have your eye on it constantly. Instead, you should be looking at useful analytics that pack a greater punch, such as whether a sale is driving conversions or whether a new blog post is bringing in traffic.

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Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value can be assessed using the Lifetime Value report. This allows you to see those who are most valuable to your company. You can utilize this by ensuring you give incentives to valuable customers.

Behaviour Reports

This is a valuable report to use and one you should consider looking at frequently.

Landing Pages

This defines a landing page as the first page in a session, and the visitor’s first interaction with your website. If you’re interested in the sources such as organic, paid social, direct, etc, driving users to the landing page, you can add Source/Medium as a secondary dimension.

Site Speed

Tells you how quickly your site is loading for users. The faster the better!

What do you think you should be looking at for your business?

Today’s Battle for Data – in the Wind and the Cloud

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article | Today’s Battle for Data - in the Wind and the Cloud | Big DataData is the new currency and often the point of strategic control in many industries. Companies are attempting to control data in order to monetize what the data can do for them. Take this example from windmill technology as an illustration:

Windmill technology has dramatically improved over the past few decades. For example, GE has developed blades and rotors that sense the wind direction and adjust a windmill’s tilt/shift in order to optimize its ability to catch the wind. In addition, many windmill “farms” optimize the way they work together since one windmill’s direction and tilt affects the downwind performance of all other windmills. Because a group of windmills operating together is more efficient than individual windmills operating separately, when one windmill fails, the efficiency of the entire farm can be adversely affected.

Industry leaders, including GE and Siemens, have developed their own optimization and monitoring services that use the data coming off the windmills to remotely monitor performance and proactively do repairs to maximize windmill uptime. However, the market for windmills is fragmented with a few large players and a series of smaller players — many of whom are lower-cost manufacturers from Asia and don’t have the scale and/or capabilities to develop and maintain such services.

In response to GE and Siemens’ control of this space, a few ingenious companies are in the process of installing – for free – sensors in both new and existing windmills. These sensors monitor motor vibration and temperature so that they can predict motor failure before it happens. The data are broadcast to the cloud in real time and predictive failure analytics are conducted on the data. Once a motor’s spec goes out of tolerance zones, a team is dispatched to repair the motor before it fails – not only to maximize the “up time” of the windmill, but also to provide peak efficiency for the entire farm.

This enables the smaller players to compete effectively with the larger firms. For example, for smaller Chinese manufacturers trying to compete with GE and Siemens, being able to provide this service is often the difference between making the sale and losing it.

So, how do you make money installing sensors for free? The key is owning exclusive access to the data generated via the sensors and leveraging it by selling higher-margin maintenance contracts back to windmill manufacturers (for newly built windmills) and to farm owners (for retrofitted, existing windmills).

The smaller players are more than willing to allow the sensors to be installed to grant access to the data and pay for higher margin maintenance since they can’t efficiently do this themselves (due to their size and scale). Meanwhile, they gain the ability to compete with the GE and Siemens of the world on services while simultaneously maintaining their cost advantages. In addition, they can eliminate downtime risk via offloading this to its sensor supplier. Therefore, it’s a win-win arrangement for both parties.

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Indeed, this is the modern-day equivalent of the “give away the razor and sell the razor blade” story. Today, the razor equivalent (the sensors) is only of value because of the system’s necessity to interoperate and the ability to monitor it remotely via the cloud and predict failure before it happens. In today’s world, it’s often beneficial to give away the hardware but own the data.

As you design a way to monetize your data-collection system, keep these key principals in mind:

  1. Benefit.The offering needs to provide a clear benefit to both you and your customer.
  2. Incentive.The giving away of the hardware to access the data can’t be for the purpose of simply selling the data to a third party. Rather, access to the data has to enable you to provide better service at a higher price point than rivals. Your unique access to the data makes it so that your customers want to buy from you since, even at a higher price point, you save them money, time and/or resources.
  3. Don’t negotiate the “back end” on the “front end.”In the windmill example, had sensor manufacturers attempted to require maintenance contracts before installing the sensors, they’d likely have received substantial pushback for anything that cost them more. However, once the sensors were in place, the added benefit or performance-based maintenance was clear.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Dr. William PutsisDr. William Putsis is a Professor of Marketing, Economics and Business Strategy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a Faculty Fellow for Executive Programs at Yale University. He is also president and CEO of Chestnut Hill Associates, a strategy consulting firm, and founder of the software company, CADEO Economics, which automates his data modeling-based strategy development processes. His new book is The Carrot and the Stick: Leveraging Strategic Control for Growth (Rotman-UTP Publishing, Feb. 3, 2020). Learn more at www.putsis.com or www.chestnuthillconsulting.com.

Business glossary vs. data dictionary

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Business glossary |Business glossary vs. data dictionaryWe live in a world that has a prominent and vast scale of complexity to deal with the business and data. We are accumulating all forms of data in every aspect from terminologies to segregating a project. Consider an organization that is building computer processors, this will have a in-sync data base systems and regulations to fill in including the device with its owners captured.

Business Glossary includes unneeded complicate nature. For instance, a startup firm of less 20 employees should not have to gather around the table characterizing Business Glossary terms. Along these lines, if few of IT workers have inquiries regarding what “invoice” explanation. Indeed, they can Skype message to their supervisors or the attorney to discuss about what that business term, among others, mean. The other way toward making a Business Glossary can prompt pedantry about delicacies on characterizing a term, removing time and assets towards being beneficial in a business. Here are a few options in contrast to the Business Glossary vs Data Glossary.

Preliminaries of business glossary

There are many cumulative data bases that has all data of a firm. Data glossary solves or show the way in dealing the complexity nut shell in an organized manner. In this turbulent data world, all the business success rate factors are dependent on each aspect of business process flow.

Values of business glossary

We have governments upheld their laws on some of these business data being a vital role for the future of a country.

Businesses data are being what they are intended, there’s astounding profundity to business glossaries, with the thoughts that is drawn them from such assorted vertices philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, cognitive science, and data science. Let me assure you, however, that while I like to seek out as much as the next information geek, I’ll downplay the powerful stuff for materialness. Not to conclude on how we take up a meeting with valuable information being conveyed and not reproducing the same tech points or flow chart while executing a new project. Business Glossary starts forming its shape from the idea level.

For final business glossary the preliminary step stands with that of the categorization. Within a business glossary, business practices are grouped into categories or clusters according to a set of criteria. Categories are backbone for which they provide the logical structure for the business glossary so that we can manage, make sense of and preliminary find terms within it.

Knowing these connections, it will ensure the categorized information is appropriately managed and kept it updated that are considerable a lot of capacities of an endeavor business glossary.

Preliminaries of data glossary;

We have a few questions that come in right away when you think of data glossary:

  • Where is the information expended within the firm?
  • Is the definition updated, affirmed and accessible or are we surveying with respect to the seasoned terms?
  • Are there synonyms words, abbreviations forms accepted or expressions that portray a similar term?
  • Does everybody utilize similar terms indefinitely?
  • Are there any extraordinary instances for this business term from past to the present time?
  • What are the effects of modification done to the source or to the formats and executing of terms?With these increasing questions thorough bits of knowledge would help a laymen to into the deep comprehension of data, we need perceivability into various components of the Data, for example, utilization, specialized and business prospectus, related policies and rules, just as the rules and duties related with the different data assets.

Values of data glossary

We have come across various cases in a firm when the new task is depending on information where it is shared across divisions and even specialized department. At the point when business lines are reliant on one another’s information, for a strong business glossary becomes basic as every business units has its own needs, responsibilities and useful utilization of data that can be the equivalent or potentially in line with the business and the rights from different clients.

This methodology turns the leverage to use a core arrangement that offers data to meet an objective. Think about the business glossary like the card index in a library. Novel books can cover up a wide range of categorization, for example, life events, history or geology or a thriller novel. They can have explicit characteristics that can assist you with scanning for the book, for example, class, distributer, configuration, writer and production date. Similarly, a business glossary can utilize different arrangements and substance about information to help in the inquiry, accessibility and utilization of the endeavor information. Having this accessible list at a venture level gives a degree of straightforwardness around assisting with maintaining a strategic distance from equivocalness around the information being used.

Diverse business partners characterize basic data glossary in an unexpected way. For instance, take “invoice.” An “invoice,” from the point of view of a buyer, may allude to the document sent that solicitates payment information. In the IT engineering sight an invoice may mean the way toward preparing a bill. In accounting, “invoice” may allude to the record sent to demand payment of a client. An explanation of whether an invoice information component is a physical thing or a procedure becomes necessary when producing invoice reports.

Why Data is Vitally Important to Your Business

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StrategyDriven OPM (organizational performance measures) Article |importance of data|Why Data is Vitally Important to Your BusinessBusinesses have always understood the importance of data and how it relates to their success. From the very beginning, companies knew they needed to understand the market and their customers to make money; the difference was, back then, collecting and accessing data wasn’t easy. That’s not the case today, as technology has helped automate many aspects of data collection, allowing companies of all sizes access to useful information. In fact, nowadays, we have access to so much data, the bigger problem is knowing which data to use and how best to interpret it.

For data to be useful, you have to be able to turn it into actionable insights, and this is where the challenge lies for businesses today. If your company can learn to make better use of its data, it can have huge benefits across your organization.

Decision Making

We make decisions based on the evidence we have available to us. In theory, the more evidence you have access to, the easier it is to make the correct decision, but this is not necessarily the case in real life. When you have an unlimited amount of evidence, it makes it far more challenging to find evidence that will lead you to the right decision. To find the most pertinent evidence to make more informed choices, your company needs people who understand data and know how to apply that data.

You can have all the data in the world, but if you don’t have employees who understand things like SQL join types and can interpret the data, it’s of limited use to your decision-making process.

Problem Solving

Without the evidence that data gives you, it becomes more difficult to spot potential problems and find solutions to fix them. Even the most straightforward processes create data, and this data can help you when problems develop with that process. When you scale this up over an entire business, the data allows you to better understand and solve the issues affecting your organization.

Track Performance

Being able to see how we’re performing against our goals is a crucial element of business success. When correctly interpreted, data can allow you to see how you’re performing in key areas. The insights you gain will enable you to evaluate all areas of your business without any complications. The right people will be able to turn vast amounts of complex data into easy to understand performance metrics that everyone can use.

Improve Processes

This information allows you to make the changes that improve processes across your business. Small changes can have a big effect on the efficiency of your business, and we all have access to the kind of data that can lead to these changes. The challenge is finding the right people to turn that data into actionable insights. The evidence you need to make informed business decisions is there in your data; you just need to be able to find it and use it effectively.

No matter what size your business is, data can play a crucial part in your success.