The “Data” in a Data Strategy
When you have business projects, you need to have a data strategy. This is the roadmap for reaching your goals. This is where you determine why you need to use data and how to use it. A data strategy is very important nowadays since this is what businesses use to be ahead of their competitors.
If you want to be on top, you need to hire a data scientist who is an expert on data strategies. They will need the data that you can provide in order for them to formulate a plan to make your projects successful. So what is data and how will you collect it? Here are some of the most important information that you need before even coming up with a data strategy.
Data. This is a collection of important information which can be translated into a form that a computer can process.
Data is the soul of every data strategy. Data is changing the business industry. It has a lot of uses in every industry that you can think of. Medicine, engineering, and even advertising! Everybody uses data to make these projects a success. In simple terms, data is just a simple information. But in business and computing, data is the information that can be processed by a machine but not but humans.
Human vs Machine: The Difference
“Human-readable” is unstructured data. These are the information that only a person can interpret, like an image or a text. “Machine-readable” are structured data. You would need a computer program to process these information. And when a set of programs are applied to a data, it is referred to a “software”. In order for a program to perform instructions on data, there should be a uniformity in structure.
News Data
Here are some of the most important Machine-readable or structured data examples that are very popular and most in use.
- Personal data. Anything that is specific to you is a personal data. These are your demographics, location, email address, and so much more. It will be in the news when it gets leaked or used in a very controversial way, like a private scandal for example.
- Transactional data. These data require an action to collect. For example, clicking on an ad, making a purchase, or maybe visiting a webpage. This is important for businesses since it helps them optimize their operations.
- Web data. This is a collective term for any data from the internet. These data are important since this is one way for a business to get the information that is not generated by their system. This can be used to monitor their competition, potential customers, generate important leads, or maybe build apps.
- Sensor data. These are data collected from your gadgets like your smartwatch who can measure your heart rate, or maybe a building with sensors that can measure the weather. This is one of the most useful source of data to optimize processes.
For your business to formulate a good Data Strategy, you need all of the information that you can gather to be successful in your goals. Above are some of the most important ways to gather them. Understand and learn the importance of each so that you can provide the important information that your data scientist may need. Remember that an organization who has a better data strategy has also better chances of being on top.
