“The world is one big data problem.” – Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist, MIT.

Every business has tons of readily data available.  Data has become the biggest asset of every business. Yet most businesses only generate reports and insights out of a fraction of their entire data.  Shocking as this only paints part of the picture.

 

Data is the new oil, Kali Bagary, CEO, The Data Company 

Harnessing the power of data is a unique challenge many businesses are addressing today.  Time consuming projects to understand where business data sits, what format it is in, how it can be used to produce insights & reports and ultimately what the best method is to bring it together are being started across the globe.

Time ticks on.  Once project plans are put in place analysts & developers are set in motion to locate data & formats, create a platform to ingest, correlate, enrich and transform data: from multiple sources.  This can take weeks and months to build, run, QA test, modify, test and run again.  This step is critical as data simply cannot be lost.

It’s more than locating & uploading data. It’s about enriching and transforming data, ready for analysis to create valuable business insights, and predicting outcomes for proactive strategic decision making.  Or, as Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President from Gartner Research says:

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”

Turning raw data from multiple sources into a single source of truth ready for analysis does not have to incur intensive labour & costs.  It can be as easy as 1 – 2 – 3.  Here are the steps of the Intelligent Data Hub (IDH):

1. Collate data: take data from different sources & formats
2. Clean data: Ingest, correlate, enrich, transform data
3. Unify data: Create a single source of truth.

 

This short video explains how it works:

This prepares data for analytic applications and AI powered predictive analytic solutions taking business intelligence to a new level. Today’s analytics tools create detailed insights into the current state of the business, whilst machine learning and benchmarking prepare future modelling.  The value of these tools being based on a single source of truth brings competitive advantage to businesses who employ these technologies as they can make more informed strategic decisions.