Your business will always need data if it’s going to keep moving ahead at a profitable pace. Not too long ago, data from databases used to be enough for any business to make complicated financial decisions. Those days are long gone.
Today, you need data from numerous sources working together if you’re going to make the right decisions. That’s when data needs to be transformed into data intelligence.
What is Data Intelligence?
Data intelligence is the analysis of various types of your data so that you can use it to further improve your services and investments. It can also refer to your use of internal sources of data so you can better gauge where you stand at the moment and predict where you’re headed in the future.
The data you use here can be gathered from your own performance, data mining, analytics, and processing.
Data intelligence aims to understand your business’ current state for use in projections and expansions. Business intelligence, on the other hand, involves the understanding of your processes in their present state, how they work and how they could be improved.
How Can Data Intelligence Help Your Business?
Data in any format will help guide your business forward, you just need to know how to use it properly. When it comes to data intelligence, you know that you have a powerful weapon at your disposal. Here are just some ways it can help your business grow.
Data Clarity
If your run a modern business, then you already have a decent amount data from multiple sources. Lots of data, though, can require a large amount of time and resources to analyze. Even if you decided to tackle it head on, over time, human error can introduce a margin of error that could prove fatal for your future ventures.
Investing in a data intelligence unit is a good way of making life easier for everyone, stripping all information of unnecessary faults and variables. This makes your data clear, concise and accurate.
Data Division
Many businesses run their data service like a buffet bar, where anyone can come and take their fill. This creates issues, including
- Unauthorized access
- Lagging of network and/or data access
- Contamination of data from irrelevant input or output
- Denial of access by concerned systems or departments because others are accessing the data
Your data should be streamlined and compartmentalized and only accessible to the people that need to access it and no one else.
Better Customer Insight
Data from outside sources can always be used to gauge how your clients and customers are reacting to your products and services. Number of sales, reorders, and returns could be compared with the rise and fall of negative and positive reviews. Throw in the number of tickets that have been raised in your customer handling and support department and you’ll begin to see a pattern in customer satisfaction and retention.
Clearer Expansion Routes
Data intelligence helps you plan how your business is going to expand in the coming months or years, including technologically. This data helps you avoid the chaos of migration and transformation phases where you have to inaccurately test solutions to problems, not knowing what’s causing them or how to best solve them. With clear cut data inputs and outputs defined, you know what kind of software, applications and hardware you may need to keep growing.
Better Reporting
Do you know how many sales you make every single day? Every single hour? Do you know if your website is garnering direct visits, visits from social media, or visits from word of mouth recommendations? If you’ve taken out business loans, when will you be profitable enough to pay them off? These are all easy to gather data points if you have the right system in place. More data means better reporting, which means more secure projections.
Saving Time
What do all those projections and data points actually do for you? You no longer have to spend time digging for information. You can make accurate reports to satisfy investors. You won’t spend hours and hours of wasted time counting sales on your fingers – data helps save you time and, as the saying goes, time is money!
Data intelligence will help your business – that is guaranteed. What you need to do is start making the move toward gathering and organizing your data. The sooner you get on it, the better it will be for your business.
