By Lynn Buck, MacKay & Company
The headlines lately are all about Big Data. However, many organizations don’t execute on small data effectively.
It always amazes me when I hear stories of how little value is placed on the mining and exploration of data, no matter the company or the industry. Worse yet, companies think they value it, but aren’t dedicating nearly enough resources to producing truly actionable intelligence from it. This may be because the cost of housing data is really expensive, but shouldn’t you want a return on that in-vestment aside from a data holding tank? It also could be that the wrong people are watching your data.
Undertaking a giant task of looking for stories in data is daunting, so start small. Look for things in the data that match your existing knowledge first. This will give you and those to whom you are providing data some comfort.
Data is like a hiking trail, once you go down a path, keep going until the story in the data stops.
By then, you should have many other connections to explore. In prior lives, I was always the data guy, no matter my official role. I would explore the data queries (searches) of those that came before me and puzzle together what I was looking for. Once I did that, I was off and running. There wasn’t a stock or purchasing optimization project I didn’t have the ability to gather data for. Mining the data for those projects gives you experience on finding other useful information. Most likely you have someone in your own organization that would like the opportunity to do this for you. Give them a couple hours to see what they can do.
Other considerations:
