There have been numerous pain points revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic. All industries, businesses, citizens, governments, and researchers have come face-to-face with this pandemic’s harsh reality. External data, in particular, has been a rising problem. While there was no lack of external data producers keen to produce relevant Covid-19 related information to the people, the suddenness and accelerated evolution of the crisis indicated that these external data sources were changing daily, sometimes even hourly.
When someone thinks of analytics and big data, it tends to be mainly in employing data they have accumulated, like demographics, customer journey, etc. The difficulty with this, though, is that it doesn’t give you the full picture. To utilize data to its full potential, companies need to collect the external data and incorporate it into their models for analysis.
The WHO, apparently the principal source of truth for infection rates, published their information in daily status reports. These reports were crucial data points to learn how the pandemic market was evolving, but were published in a way that made it completely impossible to use – it’s nice to view the information. Still, you can’t model and spot the pandemic market trends and predict results with those reports.
What is External Data?
External data is any data produced from outside an organization. It can come from various sources, and open data initiatives are now abundant, making accessible a wealth of external data for analysis.
Problems Faced
Facing the problem with lots of available data, but very little of it accessible, companies are making to do with what they have, tying into data sources when feasible, and piecing together spreadsheet. The pandemic’s initial few months showed that the data sources were crucial to understanding where the pandemic market was and where it was going. Now, as companies look towards returning to “business-as-usual,” several people are considering how to use external data more frequently to help them navigate the unpredictable pandemic market economy.
Here are some questions & answers that will help you streamline your external data infrastructure without creating many additional pandemic market expenses.
How to Streamline Your External Data?
As we head into the tenth-month working from home, what is the primary business objective for businesses trying to get back on track?
We’re going to notice a drastic change in business priorities from innovation to optimization. Data science departments have been overburdened for years now, and that must change fast. The janitorial job of connecting to external data is a massive problem, and it’s burning nearly 80% of a data scientist’s time. Optimizing this process must be prioritized for any business that wishes to become “data first.”
How can we define “external” data?
External data is anything you didn’t produce, whether from other businesses, government sources, or any employee. If you didn’t create the data, it’s external, and you’re probably working much harder than you must to get it. There’s an assumption that the companies have this figured out, but if you rub the surface of most data channels, there’s a lot of careful and manual work being done to utilize even just a portion of what’s available.
Go for a process that goes beyond statistics of prior behaviors and presents factual insights and data about how customers are feeling, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what are they planning to do in the future. It is particularly timely for the current pandemic market, where disruption appears to be the norm and left several wondering about what the future now being shaped by new customer behaviors will look like.
Role of external data for organizations to Map Out their Market Game Plan
Conventional models are going to have to be improved with new information. For numerous businesses, finding these sources of data is still a big headache. Understanding a scalable way to automate public data and connect to new sources of data must be top of mind for anyone who’s attempting to get predictive.
Future of Data in the Company
Every business must adopt data first policy in this pandemic market to survive. If you look at Apple and Amazon, they have always concentrated on data as a core feature to run their business. The market will be defined by the companies that figure out how to streamline the course of data into their everyday processes. Optimizing external data use doesn’t sound as lovely as innovation, but it’s the requirement for unlocking the real value of data for your business in this current pandemic market situation.
Final Thoughts
Today’s pandemic market demands businesses to sync data science with business priorities to achieve organizational data success.
Steve
4 years ago