Sarah JamesData is the new oil, as pundits have long claimed. And who could object? For contemporary businesses, data has evolved into an essential natural resource and a requirement for commercial decision-making.
But there’s a snag in the works (or in this case, the oil). Businesses must be able to respond to a crucial question: What is the data trying to say? Despite the fact that organisations may be collecting it from all directions — from every person, place, and object in a seemingly endless digital trail — to extract value.
Many firms, desperate for solutions, pour increasing amounts of information into storage, as if doing so will automatically produce deeper insights. However, people continue to be perplexed, stumbling around in the dark looking for the “aha!” moments that create a greater understanding of customers operational efficiencies, customer comprehension, and other competitive advantages.
This is due to the fact that the issue is not the volume of data, but rather the capacity to extract meaningful insights from it. In the restrictive method the information is maintained doesn’t accommodate business queries that help define the contours of tailored product suggestions, real-time fraud detection, and medical treatment paths, to mention a few examples.
Not just storing facts
Relational databases (RDMBS), the foundation of traditional systems like data warehouses, are made for storing facts rather than analysing data in terms of who provided it and from where. Tables in RDBMS naturally exist in a data lake as separate files. You might be able to identify a few lone insights in the data, but you’ll miss the insights hidden in the data that let businesses approach problems with finesse.
Throughout most businesses, several organisational silos, such as sales, marketing, customer service, and supply chain, house various data points. This results in a disjointed, limited perspective of how an entity engages with the business.
Even computer programmes that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) frequently operate in silos, with each team focusing on a particular problem. They might eventually come up with solutions, but since they’re using different sets of information, they’re unlikely to make any deeper discoveries (i.e., patterns or affinities) that would increase the precision of their model in providing answers to the business concerns.
At a time when businesses are under constant pressure to better understand customer behaviour, anticipate market shifts, and predict what will come next for the company in a dynamic world, missing the meaning in information is a losing proposition.
Additionally, it is crucial for identifying financial fraud, tailoring patient care, managing convoluted supply chains, and identifying security concerns, in addition to these business applications.
In order for an organisation to achieve the ideal state in the data journey, they must first identify the connections within, between, and among all of this data in order to generate actionable insights.
How does a company get there? Here are three helpful suggestions.
1. Eliminate silos
Many businesses invest millions of dollars in recruiting data scientists, creating fresh data models, and researching AI and ML techniques. In large organisations, these projects frequently operate in separate silos.
The company now has a single, unified image of each client connection thanks to a new approach that combed through all of its customer info and linked customer identities via their mobile phone numbers, email addresses, devices, addresses, credit cards, and more.
Companies can assess how a person, place, or thing interacts throughout the business from the perspective of the entity by combining data from many silos into one enterprise-wide dataset.
2. Choose the right data base technology for the right workload
Despite their name, relational databases find it difficult to independently identify data relationships between, within, and among various data pieces.
Finding context, linkages, and links in data is necessary to answer higher-level issues like how to make supply chains more efficient or tailor product suggestions for customers.
A more recent technology that offers a whole different way to organise it around relationships is called a graph database. One can observe all the links and linkages between the data in these databases.
Organizations are able to concentrate on responding to relationship-based queries by integrating graph analytics into their systems.
3. Unlock smarter insights at scale with machine learning on connected data
Organizations can leverage connected data and graph features to make better predictions by speeding the development of graph-enhanced machine learning. Organizations are able to have access to even more potent insights and commercial effect because of the precise predictive capability resulting from distinctive graph features and graph models.
Thanks to built-in capabilities like distributed storage, massively parallel processing, and graph-based partitioning to create training, validation, and test graph datasets, users may easily train graph neural networks without the need for a powerful machine. Better representations as a result of handling different data types, creating an unifying model, and having a method to represent data to get the best business results from AI.
The three pieces of advise above demonstrate how important it is for organisations to embrace a contemporary perspective, one that enables them to comprehend not only the individual data points but also the links and interdependence among all connections. Companies need to be able to balance viewpoint, scale, and speed in order to succeed with data. Additionally, they need to be able to ask and respond to important, sophisticated relationship-based inquiries quickly enough for business.
The only other option for modern businesses to effectively use it as the new oil is in this manner.