Fix Your Data In 4 Simple Steps

You’re not the only one who feels like you have too much data on your hands. From an engineer’s perspective, it might be excessive amounts of product and performance data. For marketers, it may be more campaign data than they have an idea what to do with.

It’s no longer “I don’t have access to that data.” Instead, it’s now “Where on Earth am I supposed to find the right data? Where do I start? I’m literally drowning in heaps of data!”

To put your data to work and get the most value out of it, we recommend doing these 4 things:

Focus on the 20% that actually matters.

We have access to so much data, we just aren’t exactly sure what to make of it. Are we reviewing the right data? Is what we are looking at the most relevant in assessing the value of [fill in the blank]. Usually in this scenario, we end up making claims and cherry-picking data to support them. This undermines the entire promise of big data.

A concept we think is important here is the 80/20 rule. And in this case, roughly 80% of your organization’s vital insight will come from 20% of the data you are collecting.

Define the data points that are important and relevant to you ahead of time. For any initiative there is a myriad of metrics available, but, only a handful of them are going to effectively measure success. Determine what those are beforehand, ensure they are aligned with your initiative’s goals and focus your attention exclusively on them.

Pull the right information, not the easy information.

Be sure to have a deep understanding of what your metrics mean and how they’re being pulled. Are they being calculated correctly? Are you pulling them from the right source? It’s never a good idea to blindly copy and paste text, so why would you do it with data?

Rather than adapting your needs to the data. Adapt the data to your needs. What are you looking for? How can you ensure you will get the answer you’re looking for? And how will you ensure it’s a reliable answer?

Context is key.

The data you have access to means nothing without the right context. Understanding the environment, history and other aspects of your business reality is key to making accurate conclusions from data. Put on the wrong glasses, and everything might mistakenly look pink.

Make sure that your business analysts, marketing analysts, and financial analysts all have the business context needed to make accurate conclusions about the metrics they define and follow. If they don’t have that context, make sure the people that do are involved.

Data should provoke action.

Data has no use unless we can learn something from it, and provoke action. Work to elevate the data you have to create informed opinions and hypothesis. Use it to provoke thought. Is this strategy really working? Should we take any immediate actions? How can I showcase key metrics in a meaningful way? What impact is this initiative having on my organization?

Build a process, a workflow, or an automated way to leverage that data into the decision making cycle, and make sure relevant stakeholders are aware of it.

With this article, we hope to inspire you to think about how you work with your data, and more importantly — does your data work for you?

Our team has quite a few thoughts about this subject, besides what we’ve listed above. Check out tonkean.com to learn more.

Thoughts? Head over to Twitter, @Tonkean, and let us know.