5 best practices to free data from silos and boost the bottom line

Ninety percent of the data that exists today was produced in the last two years; that’s thanks to2.5 quintillion bytes of data we collectively create every day. That number is increasing rapidly, largely due to new IoT devices, sensors, beacons, and new technologies being created every day.

Data is often seen as someone else’s problem, rather than everybody’s opportunity. This is unsurprising, given the unimaginable scale of information generated by even modestly-sized businesses, and the perceived difficulty of turning this data into usable insight. The problem, however, is not one of data volumes or the complexity of analytical tools, but the lack of integration of different data sources and the technologies that can turn raw information into actionable insight.

If, as Clemenceau observed, war is too important to be left to the generals, then data is much too valuable to be left to the data scientists. If businesses can unshackle their data and make it available to all, they can transform their operations, unlock new revenue opportunities, and build new strategies informed by their vast stores of information.

Here are a few best practices to take into account in the burgeoning Age of Data.

Too often various units within a business keep data to themselves. From email lists and net promoter scores (NPS) to ticket close rates, outages, or mobile search data, sharing information can inform operations and strategies across every business department – but only if the raw data can be freed from the strictures of their individual silos, transmuted into a useable, contextualized format, and be viewed in real-time.

If the problem lies with the lack of integration of different data sources and technologies that can turn raw information into actionable insight, then the solution is to build a single “data lake” that can store all the information generated and gathered by a business.