Stop your data going rogue

iStart, 13 July 2011- by David McNickel

These days every digital transaction you do generates data, and chances are that data is being stored. Mobile apps, web transactions, loyalty schemes & more provide a wealth of potential information resources. But with so much data being collected, how do you stop it becoming a rogue elephant and actually apply it to inform your business? David McNickel investigates how business intelligence can move smart companies from average to extraordinary...

Perhaps one of the first things to make clear in any story about business intelligence (BI) is that data, and information, are not the same thing. To wit, the dictionary defines 'data' as; 'individual facts, statistics, or items', whereas 'information' is described as; 'the meaning given to data by the way in which it is interpreted'. Apply some thought to your data, says Datamine managing director Mike Parsons, and you will get information. “Any time data is collected - and it's collected more than you think - there's a way to leverage that into understanding.” The problem is, however, that for years, deciding to actually do that has been a big ask for many companies. “Most businesses,” he says, “especially large ones, spend a zillion dollars building these IT systems and collecting huge repositories of data that they don't do anything with. If they just spent one per cent of the money they spend on IT trying to figure out what to do with all that data - the benefits could be huge.”

So what might some of those benefits be?...

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