Data is not everything for your company.

One of my CTO friends of a Philadelphia tech company once said: “Data is everything. Data has become a company asset.” I disagree with this statement. It is not about just data, it is about the right data for your company and the most important what you do with this data.

Companies collect tons of data every day and the challenge is still here: What to do with it? How to better utilize it? A trend for custom software development will be the following: companies will buy more systems to collect, store and analyze data. But why do you need so much data? To make better decisions. As you have tons of data already, let’s focus on analyzing and making better decisions. There are two ways you can do that: Using data visualization and artificial intelligence solutions.

Data visualization is a graphic representation of information to help make better decisions. In order to process a big amount of text information in a spreadsheet form, for instance, you need time, a lot of time. But then try to imagine how much time it would take to process a dataset with 1 million rows with 10 different criteria? An impossible task. Data visualization helps to see patterns that you are looking for as well as insights in a shorter time period, so a decision can be made faster and more accurately. However, it is still relying on you to make a final decision.

What about a tool that makes a decision for you?It does not exist. Not yet, but what you can use is Artificial intelligence.

The difference between data visualization is that AI will process data, find patterns and based on how you taught it to make decisions recommendation. The biggest challenge is AI is good as the data you feed it. For example, based on images of wounds with additional questions AI would be able to accurately identify the difference between patient’s venous ulcer and arterial ulcer. By the end of a day, this will help doctors to spend more time with patients who really need help and save time on healthy patients. Remember, AI is just a tool, it won’t make a decision for you, but it will help you with recommendations and identifying patterns on a large scale.

New tools are created every day to help companies make sense of the data they have. Data is not everything. The right data is the key.