Spencer Nguyen - March 17, 2022
Data drives the success of today’s businesses. Simply collecting data, however, does not mean that you can use it in ways that help your organization reach its goals. The following article discusses the role that organizational data readiness plays in your search for efficient, effective business processes at all levels of your business.
Start your free trial with DreamFactory to see how much easier organizational data readiness becomes when you generate low-code APIs that connect all of your enterprise data sources.
What Is Organizational Data Readiness?
Organizational data readiness means that your business has high-quality data and effective processes to derive meaning from the information. With high organizational data readiness, you can track data in real-time – or at least very close to real-time. With low organizational data readiness, you might not even know where you store information that’s critical to choosing successful business models or processes.
Align Your Data Strategy and Business Strategy
You can’t have data readiness until you align your data strategy and business strategy. Aligning your priorities often entails steps like:
- Identifying the types of data that help you predict emerging trends within your industry.
- Choosing a business intelligence methodology that lets you optimize your roadmap to higher revenues.
- Finding data storage and data integration options that work well with the tools you already own.
- Using data to streamline complex business practices for faster, more accurate results.
Minimize Data Silos
Data silos often create barriers to strategic alignment. When you have diverse information systems, departments might use different formats, tools, and databases.
Breaking down data silos will prepare your business for the digital transformation you need to optimize business processes. If you let those silos stand, someone will inevitably waste time processing duplicate data, trying to merge incompatible formats, or populating databases with unrelated information.
Know Your Data Sources and Data Quality
Organizational data readiness relies on you knowing your data sources and data quality. Data collection might include sources such as:
- Customer questionnaire responses
- Social media interactions
- E-commerce platforms (Salesforce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc.)
- Email marketing
Knowing the data’s source helps you determine if it fits into the qualitative or quantitative category. Then, you can take a closer look to determine the data’s quality and reliability. Low-quality data could come from incomplete questionnaires, missed customer touchpoints, and inaccurate data analytics that confuses machine learning. Unified data sources should help you avoid problems created by low-quality data.
No matter where your information comes from, you need a way to combine massive amounts of data that might come in various formats. API-led integration gives you a head start by letting you combine databases quickly.
Choose the Right Tools for Data Collection, Management, and Data Analytics
At least 80% of the world’s data is unstructured. Researchers say that amount of unstructured data will grow from 33 billion terabytes in 2018 to 175 billion terabytes in 2025. Companies that learn how to take unstructured data out of storage and analyze it will gain a competitive advantage.
Adopting the right tools is the only way to turn big data into high-quality data sets that benefit business decision-making. Some of the most popular tools for data analysis and business intelligence include:
DreamFactory integrates with a broad range of tools, including databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MemSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Start your trial to see how easily DreamFactory integrates with the products you already use.
Perform a Data Readiness Assessment or Audit
Your organization’s readiness will likely evolve over time. Ideally, you want to move forward so you can make data-driven decisions about everything from staffing to marketing campaigns.
Before you can perform a data readiness assessment, you need to know your organization’s current state. What are your shortcomings? Where do you excel?
As you take steps to improve your organizational data readiness, focus on:
- Data strategy
- Data completeness
- Data quality
- Data governance
- Data accessibility
When decision-makers within your organization feel confident that you manage these factors as well as possible, you have probably reached an excellent level of data readiness.
Improve Your Organizational Readiness With DreamFactory
DreamFactory has a wealth of features that can improve your approach to organizational data readiness. DreamFactory comes with outstanding security measures appropriate for healthcare and storing customer data. You also benefit from instant API creation, live API docs, logging, reporting, API limits, and combined databases.
Start your trial today so you can see how DreamFactory contributes to data governance that gives you a competitive advantage.
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As a seasoned content moderator with a keen eye for detail and a passion for upholding the highest standards of quality and integrity in all of their work, Spencer Nguyen brings a professional yet empathetic approach to every task.