We all use data with or without realising it in everyday situations, whether it is at our permanent place of employment, our one (wo)man band business or at home.
When we think of the word “data” we might think of quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media. Data is a way of helping your business grow. Gartner mdm magic quadrant are experts on this subject.
What is Data?
Data are individual units of information. Although the terms “data”, “information” and “knowledge” are often used interchangeably, each of these terms has it’s own meaning. Data is sometimes said to be transformed into information when it is viewed in context or in post-analysis. However, data are simply units of information. Data is used in several important ways, scientific research, businesses management, finance, governance and in every other form of human organizational activity. Data is measured, collected and reported then analyzed, it can be visualized using graphs, images or other analysis tools. Data as a general concept refers to the fact that some existing information or knowledge is represented or coded in some form suitable for better usage or processing. Raw data needs to be corrected to remove outliers, obvious instrument or any such data entry errors. Raw data is a collection of either numbers or characters before it has been “cleaned” or in other words corrected by researchers before been published.
Data helps you make better decisions
Even a one-person startup generate data. Any such business with a website, a social media presence, that accepts electronic payments of some form, etc., has data about customers, user experience, web traffic, and more. All that data is filled with potential if you can learn to access it and use it to improve your company and what leads to or influences the decisions you make? Do you rely on what you see happening in your company? What you see or read in the news? Do you follow your gut instance? All of these things can be helpful when making decisions, but how powerful would it be to make decisions backed by actual numbers and information about a company performance? That’s profit-increasing power you can’t afford to miss.
Data helps you solve problems
How do you pinpoint what went wrong or was not as successful as you first thought? Trying to find the reason for under performance without data is like trying to hit the bulls-eye on a dartboard with your eyes closed, and as we all know, this is near impossible.
Tracking and reviewing the data from the business helps you pinpoint performance breakdowns so you can understand better and interpret each part of the process and know which steps need to be adjusted accordingly and which are performing reasonably well for you to succeed. Sports teams are a great example of businesses that collect data to make their teams better and improve on their performance. If sports coaches don’t collect data about their players performances, how are they supposed to know what players do well and how they can effectively improve the team.
