In this blog, we explore the missing opportunities in your data strategy and provide actionable ideas that you can use in your own business.
Businesses produce a lot of data. The big challenge that a lot of businesses have, regardless of the industry, is making sense of all that data.
Having a strong data strategy can make sure that you make the most of all the data your businesses produce, but a lot of organizations seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the most valuable data that’s found within your business.
What are most businesses missing in their data strategy?
Thanks to the digitization of virtually everything from animation to healthcare, industries are generating petabytes of unstructured data. This would be great if that data was being taken advantage of, but what we’re finding is that most businesses don’t have a strategy in place to manage, store, or access this data in a hybrid setting (or at all). When you consider that as much as 90% of the data found within any business is unstructured, that’s a huge missed opportunity.
When you take into account that less than 18% of organizations currently take advantage of the unstructured data they have, it leaves businesses open to gain a massive competitive advantage over others in their industry who aren’t using unstructured data.
Unstructured data is typically overlooked because it’s viewed as being nowhere near as easy to handle as structured data. It doesn’t easily fit into a traditional database, which can make it difficult to analyze and search. On top of that, the majority of legacy tech wasn’t built with unstructured data in mind. To work with that data you had to rebuild architecture, refactor applications, or do other complex processes to get anything out of their data.
At least that’s the way it used to be.
These days unstructured data is more available than ever. It forms the foundation of today’s innovations that we see today. For example, the COVID-19 vaccine, interactive museum exhibits, and the visual effects in the new James Bond film all came to be with the help of unstructured data.
Today tools make it simple to work with unstructured data and transform it into value. Modern data services can integrate with the cloud and allow you to work with file data in its native form.
How can I transform my organization’s data from overwhelming clutter into actionable insights?
This is the big challenge you need to overcome to take advantage of your unstructured data. The good news, as we mentioned above, is that it’s not as difficult as it once was to tap into this data.
To start, you need to understand what you want from your data. What questions do you want to answer? What are your desired business outcomes? The better you understand your goals, the more likely you are to understand how data insights can make those happen.
The next step is to get your data infrastructure in place. You need to consider two major factors in this step. You need enough storage to organize your data and you need to have analytics and machine learning systems in place to extract insights from the data.
The ideal system for your business depends on the kind of data you’re working with. For unstructured data, you need a system capable of managing that for you. You also need to think about scalability. Unstructured data grows by as much as 65% a year, so you have to be able to handle that.
Finally, remember that the goal is making unstructured data easier to work with, not harder. Pick a platform that offers a single source of truth for your unstructured data, so you’re not losing valuable information to data silos you may not have access to. You want to be able to see it all at once to make the most of your data.
Fill the gaps in your data strategy
If you’re ready to gain a competitive advantage over the 80% of your competitors that don’t take advantage of their unstructured data, let’s talk. We can help you get a scalable solution that keeps all your data in one place, so you can make the most of it.
Contact us today to learn more.
