10 Questions that Will Change the Economics of Your Data Business

Whether you work with client-provided data or third party sources, you have built a successful business of understanding and delivering insight to your customers.

Yet, you – and they – need more.

You constantly need to incorporate more data into your offering. Your customers keep asking new questions they want answered. You need to keep up, stay competitive and make data work for you…not the other way around.

Answer these ten questions to find out if data is the bounty or bane of your business:

1. Do you (or someone in your organization) spend more than 50% of your time getting data ready to use? Most data service providers would admit that 80% of their effort is spent on data preparation and only 20% on high-value activities that actually drive revenue. Flip the ratio, turn back the clock and think about solutions that can do the tedious data preparation work for
2. Do you deal with unknowns when you price your offering because you don’t know what data issues you will encounter? Or worse…do you take a loss every time you take on a new project? If you find yourself having to guess at how long it will take to get your client their analysis or you build in more hours for data preparation than for time you will spend working on high value services, you are not alone. Data preparation, data forensics and data unknowns are the biggest unknowns of selling data. Look at your existing tool set and see where the bottlenecks are – are you manually cleaning and preparing data? Are you trying to stretch the limits of Excel or SQL? Are you trying to learn new tools like MapReduce and Java? There’s a betterscalable, risk-free modern data prep approach.
3. Are you spending sleepless nights due to inaccurate or incomplete results in your offering? Is this due to the error- prone nature of manual data prep? For most organizations today, data is a mission and vision-critical asset. Your customers are relying on the data provided by you to make key strategic and operational business decisions like what products to build? What campaigns to run? How to price their offerings? The stakes are high and the accuracy of the data is paramount to your business and your customers. Look for solutions that automate the manual work and reduce
4. Have you ever looked back at an old data project, only to discover that you had version control issues, or the person who worked on the data is no longer available, or the decisions made to get to that data set are not evident? Raw data goes through various data refinement steps before it is transformed into usable insights-rich, context-aware information. Tracking the various data curation steps, touches and history is paramount to understanding, trusting and relying on data for business decisions. Look for solutions that augment data curation with tracking, lineage and versioning so you have control over data issues.
5. Do you work with sensitive data – PHI, PII etc. and need to manage who touches it, what they do with it and why? The customers you serve don’t want any doubt as to how data is brought together before they use it. Look for solutions that offer complete control over access, usage and lineage with a modern data preparation solution that has been designed from the ground up for security, governance and
6. How do you manage the multi- structured data deluge? As new data sources like sensors, machine logs, social media and Internet of Things (IoT) devices come online, the traditional schema-driven approach to organizing data just doesn’t work. Do you find that you have to build out schemas in order to “stuff” the data into containers you can work with? Are you forced to sample data before you decide how best to integrate it? Is the workload of just processing multi-structured data creating pains for your organization? Look for solutions that offer the flexibility of schema-free data preparation without data
7. Are you able to build innovative data offerings, move up the data value chain and outsmart your competition? Data has been called the “oil” of the 21st It has been compared to assets like labor and capital. Of course, you know that. That’s why you build your business on data. But how do you move up the value chain? The answer – more data. Combine diverse data sets together and offer your customers powerful insights to take better business decisions. How about combining social media data with demographics and web browsing data to predict propensity to buy or churn? Think this sounds daunting? Solutions with machine learning will combine diverse data sets automatically with very little effort on your part.
8. Are you moving fast enough? Does the speed by which data is generated bring your business to a screeching halt? The value of data decreases exponentially with time. Gain first-mover advantage by using solutions that help bring your offerings to market faster. Look for modern data prep solutions to move away from time and resource intensive manual data preparation to an automated, repeatable and timely process to deliver solutions while data still has
9. Are you short-staffed of data experts who have to do technical heavy lifting for your offering to see the light of day? Data scientists, data developers and data wizards can often be bottlenecks, even when they don’t know it. What would happen if EVERYONE in your company could take place in getting data ready for the market? Use interactive, visual, code- free, analyst-centric data preparation solutions to bring the power of data into the hands of business analysts and get your offering out the
10. Does innovation come at a price your organization can’t afford to pay? You have already made huge investments in people, processes and technology. Do you find that you still can’t get your offering out the door without a lot of friction? Is that because your existing infrastructure is too rigid? Seek solutions that are easy to use, integrate all data sources (e.g., Hadoop, SFDC, Excel, data warehouses) and have seamless integration into BI and visualization tools your teams

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