In the era of digital transformation, data is everything to any organisation driven by long-term business performance. Data acts as the fuel to your business operations and decision-making, allowing you to make informed decisions that can help you reach your organisation’s goals – whether that includes additional sales, improved efficiency or customer experience. But can you trust your data?
Through the latest innovations in AI and machine learning, data can be mined in greater volumes, meaning these decisions can be made even faster. We now have more data at our fingertips than ever. But while this boom in information is absolutely an example of positive progress, it makes data security and reliability more crucial than ever. With so much depending on this data, how can you ensure it’s trustworthy? How can you guarantee that the decisions you are making are based on dependable and secure information?
Ensuring your data can be trusted and properly implemented for decision-making purposes doesn’t have to be difficult. When auditing your data for this sought-after trustworthiness, there are three factors to keep in mind for reliable decision-making:
Enabling Consistent and Transparent Access
Having consistent access to your data – whether from a CRM database or from an implemented cloud suite of integrated systems – is critical to achieving trust. This ability to maintain a transparent pathway to your data allows you to ensure its authenticity and quality every day. Investing in data management and quality tools provides this data access and control across all business operations and departments, from Sales and Marketing to Manufacturing and Operations. This gives you unprecedented visibility into your business processes. Additional, through cloud technology, that data can be accessed remotely, ensuring team members have visibility into operations no matter where they are. The right technology means you can access your data when you need it most.
Building a security strategy for reliability
Finally, security must always be a priority in the pursuit of data trustworthiness. When your data is safe and uncompromised, you can trust that the resulting decisions being made are accurate and will contribute to your success. Security implementations can range from two-factor authentication of logins to back-up procedures and storage in case of data loss.
What matters is that you have a security strategy in place, and that all team members are unified in this pursuit. Consider bringing in a third-party professional to audit your data’s security and search for potential gaps in your system. They can make recommendations on technology and procedure implementations to ensure you can truly trust that your building data is safe.
At Data Clarity we offer full data audits to take you through the full data discovery and strategy recommendation process. You can find out more about our audit process here.
Providing Context gives Data Meaning
As important as access to this raw data is, it is ultimately meaningless in a vacuum. On its own, it provides no insight without context around it to give it value and drive understanding. When presented with the proper context, the full picture can be understood, and the data can be leveraged to make effective decisions.
For instance, raw data from the shop floor can show that the store is inexplicably requiring larger quantities of a certain product on weekends. Without context, managers could safely assume that they need to order larger quantities of stock. But this data needs context to truly understand it; by cross-referencing with weather reports on those weekends, they can discover that this is a short-term trend, and therefore ordering large quantities of stock may not sell, based on the weather reports for the next period.
Context gives data meaning and drives intelligent decision making. Ultimately, data can only be as smart as we are; we have to connect the dots to properly understand it.
Intelligent Data Powers Intelligent Decision-Making
When these three factors are represented in your data management and analysis strategy – access, context and security – the resulting database is robust and reliable, providing an accurate and holistic view into your building operations. You can trust the data delivered by your organisation’s equipment and systems, and therefore can make informed decisions for long-term performance. Because when your data is trustworthy, your resulting decisions are trustworthy too.