When building out your business intelligence solution an important step of developing data collection processes and documenting those processes is critical to your business and its success. Why develop a data collection process? Not only will creating a data collection process standardize the way you collect data for all the groups in your business but it will ensure the integrity of your data is kept high. Processes will ensure that your actions are repeatable, reproducible, accurate, and stable. Think about it: if a business had an employee that was collecting critical data on the business and the business had no idea how it was being collected and that employee left, that would have some impact on the business. Would the business be able to figure out how the employee was doing this but after how long? At what cost to the business? Could there be repercussions? Ensuring processes are in place for your data collection will improve the likelihood that the data is secure, available, clean and the measurements derived from that data will help the business now and in the future.
There are many reasons why every business should be documenting the data collection process. If you are then documenting your processes becomes transparent and your data becomes comprehensible in the future for yourself and others. Your documentation of each of the data collection process should include:
• A good description behind the data that is being collected.
• Provide all the answers: the who, what, why, where and how of the data.
• Provide any conditions of the use of the data as well as the confidentiality.
• Provide any history around the project for collecting this data