Featured article by Peter McAllister, Marketing Enthusiast and Independent Technology Author
Data analytics and cloud computing are extremely powerful tools that every company should be using to grow and thrive. Having a way to analyse the data that drives your business is essential and should be a priority in the coming years.
However, the term data analytics is a sort of catch all for many businesses that don’t fully understand the function. As such, it can be something not widely understood and results in its misuse that doesn’t give the benefits that were expected.
When your data analysis is not in depth or not used correctly, then it will lead to some bad decision making and can impact your company negatively.
In this article, I will go over several of the myths that can derail your efforts to use data to help grow your business.
1 – Any data is good data
You can only get insights that are useful when you have a complete picture when using the data that you have at your disposal. How it is analyzed is going to go a long way towards how it is put into action.
If your business is convinced that as long as you have a data set to look at, then it is going to automatically be relevant is wishful thinking. Your data needs to be managed to sort out the good from the bad, or least useless.
Gartner master data management has a list of MDM vendors that help you sift through the data to zero in on the relevant data sets that will enable you to properly forecast and plan.
Finding the right MDM for your needs will go a long way towards building a good foundation for your data to help you overcome whatever problems your business is facing.
2 – You can accurately predict the future with data
Though the details that good data can provide to your business can be very accurate, it is not a system that is infallible. First, data is just data and how it is analysed is what will make the difference in what it can tell you about how things may go in the future.
Forecasting is not accurate in many ways. Now, when you are using your data to plan, it means you can position your business to take advantage of a future that you think will come. Just like a meteorologist can take the information at hand to predict bad weather so you can plan your trip to the beach, it can always change.
This can lead to a sense of overconfidence that may derail your plans as the future you envisioned doesn’t come to pass.
3 – Data analytics is expensive
Before cloud computing and the blockchain came into being, this statement was very true. However, now that you don’t really need to have a server running complicated computations, much of the analysis is being done off premise and with the use of AI.
It costs less and takes less time to do the same operations that years ago were hardly even possible.
