In the modern era companies have to transform. The fast-paced, tech-oriented business landscape demands that, in order to keep up with or even outdo your competition, you have to be thinking ahead. You have to make the changes in data management to your company that are necessary.
Business and technology become more and more inextricably linked. The changes that companies seek to make today tend to relate most heavily to technology.
We can also refer these changes to as digital transformations. A digital transformation could mean a company which previously had no investment in its digital side embracing digitalization in some area. Also, it could mean a company which already has digital pedigree working to discover the most advanced version of whatever they are already doing.
There are a lot of things which a company can change to complete a digital transformation. But one of the most powerful options is the embrace and implementation of proper data management. So, given that, let’s take a look at in which ways can we use data management to make an impact on a digital transformation.
1. Cracking the Data Conundrum
There’s a great irony to the ascension of data as a kind of business currency. On the one hand, we now live in a world where it is completely possible to gather enormous amounts of data in a very short time.
Glenn Harris, data manager at BritStudent and 1Day2Write suggests:
If you owned a shop 200 years ago you could perhaps keep a tally of the customers walking into a store and try and write down all of the things that you see them touch or look at as well as whether they bought and what they bought. However today, with online stores receiving thousands of clicks a day, data is gatherable in bulk, with every action a user takes on a site recordable through the device they use to do the browsing, a computer.
Data is like gold or oil in the early part of their boon. It wasn’t so much about finding gold or oil, that was easy enough. It was getting at it. And the people who cracked that became instant millionaires.
With data, it’s all about management. Also, when you find yourself swimming in data, you need rigorous data management to make something of any of it. That’s the first step to a transformation.
2. Using Data for Better Understanding
Once you can read and manage data you need to know what you’re looking for. Most companies will be looking to discover ‘data behaviors’ meaning accurate depictions of their customer base through the language of data.
As soon as you identify something about your user base of customers, you need to act on it. Because whatever you have figured out can be plied then and there to create yourself an advantage.
For example, if you find a trend in your data that 75% of people who click on a certain brand of refrigerator always immediately click away to another, then you know that in your upcoming sales you should be pushing for the second brand.
Similarly, it might turn out that the attraction to the refrigerator section is part of a store-wide trend towards kitchen appliances over home appliances. This forces you to better market your home appliances or abandon home appliances altogether and embrace the kitchenware.
You use data management to understand your customers and to give them what they want. And customer data quality proves to be one of the essential drivers of digital marketers’ efforts.
3. Data Training
Above all, data isn’t a fad. It’s the new way of understanding value, a new currency. Companies who are really keen to complete a true digital transformation won’t simply higher in a single expert or expert team. Also, they won’t get one computer loaded with machine learning software. They will shift the company culture.
By this I mean to say that a big part of a digital transformation is the transformation of the employees themselves, and of the company’s whole outlook.
Staff training has to begin to include understanding the importance of data and the reasons why a shift in the data has to mean a shift in company policy or behavior.
Essie Lynch, tech writer at Australia2Write and WriteMyx says:
The more well-acquainted your company is with the intricacies and benefits of data, the more that your digital transformation will handle itself since a company is its principles and the staff that it retains.
Get everyone on board and things will start to change.
4. Data Security
One of the most overlooked elements to a digital transformation is security. There’s a wildly misguided sense in which a company without a storefront is somehow safer from threats.
Cybercrime is a massive threat, which remains completely under-explored. In fact, it is only in the last year or two that regulations have been introduced surrounding data flow, and data security, largely pertaining to how companies handle data.
You have to protect your data. It can be corrupted, stolen, held hostage and mismanaging its security can spell disaster for you and your company.
Data is the present and the future and it is at the heart of all data transformations.
It is vital that, if you haven’t already, you get involved in the managing, storing, securing and utilizing of the data that you are able to collect. It is a crucial instrument for every modern company around.
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