A Better plan to date acquisition to avoid data accusations
As discussed in my previous writing, the core and the vital process of a data project is data gathering. There are many cases where data are available readily for one’s consumption. In some cases, however, organizations frequently miss out on this process or are not given enough weightage. The company who relaxed in this area, in their early stage, are the ones who struggle to cope up with their competitors. There are mainly two ways to get data: data collection, and data acquisition. We will see one after the other in the following passages and explore the possibilities of giving hope for a data project if data is not provided enough attention in the early stage.
First of all, It’s technically wrong to say data collection is the same terminology as data acquisition; because data acquisition is acquiring data realtime through some means of third party app or standalone devices like, a smartphone which gets data from your phone’s gyroscope or voice recorder, whereas data collection is nothing but collecting existing data from various sources, which has already been acquired or readily available on the internet. So, in the first case, data collection, it’s never a problem to get data in the later stage of a project. In the second case, however, if you have already missed the opportunity of the data acquisition, the only option is to go with data collection, what so ever, you have to compromise some factors a bit, and your competitors are, indeed, way ahead. However, data collection and data acquisition both has a few common enemies: data laws governing this process, restrictions from clients to use their data for general purpose, and ratification from the public for violating their data privacy.
As far as data collection is concerned, it has two parts: manual data collection, and digital data collection. Manual is as simple as how hard it is to carry out the process- it’s just manual work like taking surveys, asking a set of people to fill a form, or getting movie reviews from the crowd coming out of movie theaters 🎭. This is an efficient way of collecting data only if the population is accommodatable, like a few 100s. However, if the population is high or the data needed to be collected is in millions, our only option is the digital collection.
One shouldn’t forget that how a few manual labored companies failed during the digital revolution. It’s the same learning we have to apply for the data collection. Pushing data collection to digital is the only promising way one can scale up and thrive in a future data-intensive world 🌎🌍. Otherwise, it will only end up in continuous restructuring, frequent re-organization, which leads to organizational level decision fatigue. Further, the impact may lead to the end of a company by losing customers, developers, and market shares. However, this has exhorted non-software-based companies to focus on a few data-software projects.
So, that’s the reason why every company, at least now, wants to get into a data project or have a data product and maintain a data cum software team. End of the day, it gives them a few vital learning in this field even if they fail.
When it comes to data acquisition, there are …
Hold on, let’s continue the data acquisition in the next post.
