How clean is your data really?

Turning your data into an asset is important as it gives us unprecedented insights and opportunities across all industries from healthcare to manufacturing to financial services to name a few. It is needless to say that big data is a common feature, for both in small as well as big businesses. However, the greater potential of big data is rather elusive and still not highly prioritised. 

The truth is due to legacy systems and accumulating of big and ‘dirty’ data, prioritising data projects can be seen as a long winded and a costly journey. For companies with such challenges, data cannot always be used as it is and needs preparation in a way so that it can be seen as an asset, this exercise can be a manual process that progresses slowly, be tedious and show no immediate value. This is where the importance of data cleaning comes in as it plays such a significant role in the journey of understanding customers behaviour better, and making calculated decisions. The exercise is considered to be a challenge due to the already high and increasing volume, variety and velocity of data in several databases, applications and in physical documents.

What are the benefits of tidying up big data?

With a lot of company’s data being traditionally messy due to legacy challenges the exercise of data cleaning can get costly when left unattended for a long time and, therefore, the significance of investing in a data journey that benefits business becomes futile. The first step to a data journey that benefits a business is getting the data clean, cleaning the data is a procedure of correcting or removing inaccurate and corrupt data. This process is crucial and emphasized and if not done can lead to a lot of problems for companies such as: 

• It can lead to uninformed business decisions or 
• Affect client records and profiles;
• under serving clients due to lack of one view of a client
• failure to maximise opportunities

There are businesses who have lost a huge amount of money due to big yet bad data. Data cleansing can filter out incorrect data, structures the data, enriches it with accurate data and ultimately preparing useful information to benefit businesses. Inaccurate data usually includes duplicate records, missing or incorrect information and poorly formatted data sets. A business that invests in enriching their data records can be useful for existing and new business use-cases that result in multiple benefits. While what data gets enriched depends on the discretion of the business needs, some basic points like fixing outdated data or details that are not verified can go a long way in unlocking opportunities for businesses.

Better quality data impacts every activity that includes better decision making. Almost all modern business processes involve data. Subsequently, when data cleaning is seen as an important organisational effort, it can lead to a wide range of benefits for all. Some of the biggest advantages include:

• Streamlined business practices: Imagine if there are no duplicates, errors, or inconsistencies in any of your records. How much more efficient would all of your key daily activities become?
• Increased productivity: Being able to focus on key work tasks instead of finding the right data or having to make corrections because of incorrect data is essential. Having access to clean high quality data, with the help of effective knowledge management can be a game changer.
• Faster sales cycle: Marketing decisions using data can sharpen a business’s approach to what to sell, who to sell to and how to sell to customers. Giving your marketing department the best quality data possible means better and more leads for your sales team to convert. The same concept applies to B2C relationships too!
• Better decisions: We touched on this before, but it’s important enough that it’s worth repeating. Better data equals better informed decision making.

How should a company approach this challenge?

This is where Khonology comes in – we believe that you use data to rationalize the irrational and enhance the qualitative views of business decisions. The only way you can do that is understand the granularity of the data which allows us to advise with conviction and substantiate the context. We believe that instead of applying a one-size-fits-all technique which might even have the highest success rate, we need to understand what customers are trying to solve for and apply bespoke thinking with befitted data and digital tools to provide scalable, feasible and effective solutions. The reason for our approach is that we find that not all problems are the same. For example, a regulation challenge at one company can be different to the next – it might be the same by principle but the actual data will reveal what the challenges are. For example: Two banks happen to both face a regulation challenge. Bank A doesn’t have its tax identity numbers and Bank B’s clients give false information and the only way to know this is to understand and be led by the data that is available. 

Good data generally leads to a business having a better bottom line. This is not only because of better external sales efforts, but also because of more efficient internal efforts and operations driven by optimised solutions using Machine Learning, RPA, Data Science and Digitisation techniques, all of which have a massive underlying component of good quality and clean data. 

Having data that is of good integrity can evolve to having a well-defined digitisation journey, it allows for digital solutions that are custom and purposefully engineered to help businesses function optimally, improve service delivery, maximise profitability and gain or retain their competitive edge, both locally and globally. Unlike other companies who advise a company first such as going to a company and applying a one-size fits all solution based on previous success. We operate slightly differently as we are able to deliver a 360-degree solution that includes understanding the end to end processes, the data and it’s flow, the people involved and what platforms are necessary to empower the overall operations.

By doing so, we believe to maximise our clients’ lifetime value and assist them in competing with industry disruptors; we can increase business agility, convert hindsight to foresight that unlocks new opportunities and thirdly can reduce exposure to regulatory sanctions protecting the companies brand from reputational risks associated with fraud and corruption.