“Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen.” — Donato Diorio
The problem for most businesses, agencies, and organizations is not a lack of data. No – for many, it is the complete opposite. Too much data can be overwhelming and leave you unable to sort through it and take what you need from it. You need to know whether the data is answering any questions that you have, you need to draw accurate and useful conclusions from the information and use it inform and make decisions for your business.
To do better, you need better. It is a huge task and one that requires careful planning and preparation. With these, it is much more straightforward to use what at one point was a whole overwhelming heap of disparate data and turn it into something useful.
To get you started, we are going to look at a few things you can do to get you started.
Have a clear question that you want your data to answer
There is little point in having a massive volume of data if it does not answer a question. Any questions you want answered need to be clear, concise and most importantly, measurable. Phrase your questions in a way that they can either qualify or disqualify solutions to the problems that you are facing in your business. You need to think about what it is that you are measuring and how you intend to measure it.
Collect your data
Now you know what questions you want to answer, and hopefully have an idea of what you are measuring and how, it is time to collect. Before you gather and organize your data, remember to consider the following points:
- What information can you obtain from existing databases or sources? Use and organize this data first
- Determine a system for storing and naming files and data ahead of time to help everyone involved in the collection process collaborate work together. This will help to save time and prevents team members from collecting the same information twice.
- If you need to collect data via interviews and observation, spend some time beforehand developing a template to ensure consistency (this is very important when collecting data) and to save time.
- Keep your collected data organized in a system with the dates it was collected and source notes, including any data normalization that you have performed. This will ensure that your conclusions can be validated further along the process.
Analyze and interpret data
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use advanced data analytics tools, as these can make sense of large volumes of information and help you to organize it in a way that makes it easier to draw conclusions from. Remember; you cannot ever prove a hypothesis correct: instead, you can only fail to reject the hypothesis. No matter how much data you collect, there is always something that can affect your results.
By following these three steps, you make better decisions for your business because your choices are supported by data that has been collected and analyzed thoroughly.
