If you have read any of our previous blogs then you will know that at Unleashed, we are passionate about how you manage data. Now, I would like to take that one step further and ask you a few questions to make you think about how you manage and store date.
Are you making your data work for you?
Data is a fascinating subject and hides a wealth of information. You could call it the history of your business. However, one of the main problems has always been, getting this unstructured data into reports that can be read by the decision makers of your business. Imagine, if you could put all of your data into one simple easy to manage reporting format – maybe a dashboard of some sort!
We all know that data is growing at an alarming rate. The challenge that senior management face is how to interrogate the data and report on growth, calculate productivity and profitability and compare this to your historic data and that of your competitors. You then have to turn all this data into making the correct business decisions.
So what is the answer?
In the first instance, your directors have to know what information they want to report on. Then that data has to be in the right structure and accessible. Lastly and probably more importantly, the data has to be accurate and reliable.
Can all this be done in-house?
A lot of large business will have dedicated IT people that can interrogate data with business tools that are readily available, but for those who don’t have these skills, they have be sourced out-with the business.
So how do we go about it?
Your IT infrastructure is pivotal to this. If you have setup your systems to enable your data to be centralised then you have the platform to start reporting. If you haven’t and data is being stored in lots of places within your network it becomes more difficult. For instance, if you sales data resides of Sales Director’s laptop and not saved back to the mains servers, you are wasting your time!
It is now more imperative than ever, to align your IT infrastructure with your business goals and let the business drive what IT does and not the other way round. If you do that you will start to get genuine business benefits. If on the other hand, you align your business to what your IT systems can do then you will fall behind your competitors because you can be assured one of them is doing things the correct way.
At Unleashed, we have a wealth of experience of helping our customers to achieve their business goals. If you would like to have a chat with one of our consultants then give us a call today 0333 240 0565 or have a look at our website www.weareunleashed.com.
