One who masters data, rules the rest

Science is but the attempt to understand how our whole world is situated and functions, both together and in terms of its parts, and technology is but the transformation of that understanding into practical gadgets in humanity’s existential service. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Data provides legs on which decisions stand. They are the tools modern managers use to confirm their hunches.
  • Data can point to new markets, help improve connections with customers and personalise products in line with customer preferences.

No matter what business you do, data has become as useful to business as air is to the lungs.

Pervasive technology was the tipping point; it transformed how data are gathered, managed and used. It also changed the contours of business.

As a result, we are now faced with astounding amounts of data. Social media, mobile devices and sensors on millions of gadgets and equipment used in everyday work generates lakes of data which if harnessed, can be studied using a suite of tools and use resultant insights to inform decisions.

For most businesses, data management remains is a herculean challenge. Datasets are scattered in silos, stuck in departmental systems that don’t talk well with one another.

The quality of data in most cases is wanting, and the associated costs for its collection and maintenance are regrettably high, which restricts its use.

VALUE

Yet, if properly harnessed, data have many uses. Data can be used to evaluate the effects of products a business produces.

Data are good at foretelling impending problems. Data provides legs on which decisions stand. They are the tools modern managers use to confirm their hunches.

Data help organisations to make predictions, uncover unexpected patterns in business, and unlock new ways of adding value to products and services.

Data can be insightful in reengineering your existing products and services, but can also be used as a springboard for imagining and testing new products.

Data can point to new markets, help improve connections with customers and personalise products in line with customer preferences.

But, without business strategy matched with a data-use strategy, these promises will remain lofty aspirations.

INSIGHT

A data-use strategy can include provisions for collecting diverse data to meet different businesses purposes.

For example, business process data – such as data about a business’s supply chain, billing, human resources management, and logistics – can be used to optimise business operations.

It is also important for a business to go beyond the data that they collect internally and explore other sources.

Then, combine these diverse datasets from both inside and outside an organisation, crunch them carefully, to reveal important insights. Insights that would be impossible with data from limited sources.

But only data scientists can help milk meaning from data. Data scientists are a tribe of professional number-crunchers.

They decipher the language of numbers, decrypt their logic, twist and squeeze truth from them.

RESULTS

Data scientists evaluate and clean data, develop programme algorithms to automate data, or design rigorous data experiments.

They are truth-tellers: they can tell when data are uncannily used to tell tall tales.

Boardrooms are beaming with talk of promising technologies but companies must first have the right strategy to leverage data.

The ultimate goal will be to create a truly data-driven enterprise — one in which data drives every person, product, and process.

The writer is an informatics specialist. Email: [email protected] @samwambugu2