Developing a data collection process and documenting

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

Who and what does no business intelligence solution impact

Having no business intelligence solution in place impacts many things and many people. It impacts your bottom line, it impacts your customers, it impacts your employees, and it impacts the understanding of your business right now and in the future.

Your bottom line

With having no business intelligence solution in place, a business cannot see the full picture on what is happening. The business cannot see where all its money is being spent, it cannot see what areas are most inefficient, they cannot see what area they are most efficient in and why and then drive those efficiencies to other areas of their business. They slow down and prevent the business from making real-time data driven decisions. Without seeing the big picture, the business can be limited or just wrong on actions that are taken that they believe are good for the business. All of these reasons as well as many more impacts your business’s bottom line.

Your customers

Having no business intelligence solution does impact your customer. I get a lot of feedback on this one and it is usually from the people that do have the silos of data running within their business. They want to feel better by giving me excuses on how not having a business intelligence solution does not impact their customers. I always tell people that if you cannot get a full picture, a full understanding of the journey a customer takes from the start of the relationship to the end of their relationship within your business you sir or mam will never see its full potential. With so many touch points that a customer could have with a business you have the potential of creating many silos of data. These silos can be in reference to marketing, selling customers additional services, interaction with customer support and even the customer on-boarding process. All these systems and any others should be integrated in order for you to get a clear understanding of the experiences your customers will go through. The silos of data, the lack of the single source of truth will hamper that understanding and the business will never understand the customer’s journey. Picture this: a stack chart and on the X axis you have date values representing the last two weeks, and on the Y axis you have a numeric representation of hours. Within the charting you have multiple columns (different colors) representing different touch points that a new customer had to take in order to become a customer and then received their service from your business. Within seconds you can see where you can improve the process and where the process is working. That is just one powerful reason on how business intelligence can impact your customers and having a single source of truth can help your business.

Your employees

How does no business intelligence solution impact your employees? Without a business intelligence solution, you have silo’s that can affect employees when other departments within your business do not wish to share their data. Think about how many times have you heard or have been involved when a department within a business has identified a problem but cannot do anything about it. I have seen a business identify a problem and could not take the appropriate measures to correct that problem because of silos of data. This can be corrected by doing several things. First, leadership must create a unified front and be creative and tactical in their approach. Work towards a common goal. I know each department has its own responsibilities but the business should have one shared vision — the business’s mission statement. Create the data governance group because that will encourage collaboration, build repeatable processes, share measures across the business, and the group will act as one team pushing to that common goal. Most humans instinctively will get behind a common goal and will feel more united when they can share the same measure of excellence to be obtained with the person next to them.

Your Single Source of Truth

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Your Single Source of Truth is a quick-read for busy business and IT professionals struggling to create a Business Intelligence solution. Packed with advice, proven methods, and real-world uses cases, this book provides the knowledge to get you not only started but to keep your Business Intelligence solution going.

This book is intended to help you understand how a business can deal with their epidemic data problems and see a bigger clearer picture from the data they are collecting. There are mountains of data being collected in many different departments each with their own transactional system (silos). And each silo is not being joined to give a bigger and clearer picture to the business. This is a data centric world and businesses are collecting and saving data at an enormous rate but most are doing nothing with that data. They are not learning from the data and not making actionable and informed decisions from the data.

Business Intelligence and silos of data is not just a small business issue — it’s an issue that all different size businesses are facing and are having problems getting their arms around. Whether it is lack of resources, low priority, or a lack of understanding that there is a problem. I believe if I can explain the issue, analyze it and point companies in the direction in solving their Business Intelligence issues then I would get to see many businesses grow and flourish. I want to help businesses answer those questions that I believe every business wants to answer: How is my business doing right now? How is my business doing compared to how it did in the past? Are all my areas of my business performing well? Which areas can have better efficiencies? What are my customers thinking and how can I better serve them? This is just a very small sample of questions that I know a business intelligence solution can help businesses answer and this book will help get you started.

Building out a Business Intelligence Solution? Make sure you document your data collection process

The first step of building out a business intelligence solution is that you have identify all the data sources within the business. It is right after you identify the datasources is that you want to develop  and document all the data collection processes. Why develop a data collection process? Not only will creating a data collection process standardize the way you collect data for all the groups from within your business but it will ensure the integrity of your data is kept very 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 for the business and the business had no idea how it was being collected and that employee left, well I think that would have some impact on the business. The business most likely will 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? I think you are understanding the point I am trying to make.  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 in the now and in the future.

There are many reasons why every business should be documenting the data collection process. If you are documenting, your processes become transparent and your data becomes comprehensible in the future for yourself and others. Your documentation of each of the data collection process should include:

  • Give 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
  • What are the measures and/or reports that will be built from this data

Even if you currently have a business intelligence solution in place but do not have all your data collection processes documented, go back and start getting them documented as soon as possible.

data governance

What is Data Governance

Businesses having a data governance committee is one of the most overlooked and undervalued areas when businesses are looking to start and/or maintain their business intelligence solution aka your single source of truth. I have fun exercise for you to do, one day go out and ask different friends and/or family of yours that are in different businesses (it could be a company with 25 employees to a company with thousands). Just ask them these two questions: Do you have data governance in your business? What is your definition of data governance? I think you might be very surprised by the answers that you receive from the people you have asked and especially if you ask people that are from different sizes of businesses.

I define data governance as the overall management (with the help of processes) to ensure the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data that is employed throughout the entire business. I said it throughout the entire business. Data governance is a cultural change within your business and can be a positive change if it is approached and implemented properly. Data governance can be disruptive in the beginning but that does not mean it cannot be a positive disruption. You have to take the approach that this is an ownership of the data and each department belongs to that feeling of ownership and has a responsibility to themselves and the business to ensure that they are doing everything they can to follow the data governance guidelines. Empower the employees and you will see that data governance within your business will go along way.

Some key benefit that a data governance can give your business:

  • Better data quality
  • Better decision making
  • Increasing Operational Efficiencies
  • Improved Data Knowledge
  • Higher Revenue
  • Regulatory Compliance