Most organizations are rapidly advancing from one stage to the other, while some are still looking at the advantages and disadvantages matrix to invest in structured data and analytics. In my view it’s never a waste of effort or money. Instead of being out of the market, it’s not too late to adopt this for better organization growth.
Now the question is where I stand in terms of data maturity, how much data is required, where should the data sit, what does data do for my business decisions. We see sometimes the head of organizations saying I don’t know what it takes but I want data driven decisions - that’s a smart choice one would make to gain an edge in the market over competitors. There is solution for any type of business and whatever stage they are in terms of data handling.
What are these stages? - I call it stage 1 when the data is in some storage area and few daily business transaction reports get generated out of it. Stage 2 is where organization decided to keep partial or full data required for business on cloud and get reports generated as required for each department. Stage 3 is where all the departments’ data are centralized and fetched for joint decision and joint analysis. This is crucial for businesses to get a centralized view. Stage 4 goes beyond reports, to analytics generating well processed data and Stage 5 is one where the organization is making more intelligent decisions with maximum usage of AL / ML enabled data analytics.
Well, few organizations do ask, I am a stage 1 kind of business, do I need all 5 stages, I might say no. Not all organization need to go through all 5 stages at a single go. It depends on the business type and what insights the organization needs. It is very important to make right decision here so that company does not over invest nor underestimate its own data.
The bottom line is that, organizations who want to have better data handling and move towards a matured way of data handling, it is imperative that it should firstly get evaluated by experts to comprehend where they stand in terms of maturity and what stage they need to reach for better business decisions since it not same for all businesses. AI and ML is playing very significant role in giving factual insights of past businesses and most likely to be in future businesses also.