Asking the Right Questions for Valuable Data Collection
Metrics & Analytics: Data as a Service (DaaS)
As companies continue to make the push to become data-driven, wrangling mass amounts of data into something directly actionable remains a huge pain point for leaders and executives. Leaders have struggled to process data to gain customer-insights and make it profitable to the organization. Many companies lack the right talent, time, and capital budgets to tackle this challenging problem leading them to turn to Data as a Service (DaaS) providers. CMax Advisors has begun a Metrics & Analytics service to help small to midsize companies tackle these challenges.
As the leader of our Metrics & Analytics practice, I wanted to share my insights on the three biggest challenges we see when companies are working to become more data driven. This will be the first of three articles tackling the first major challenge.
When trying to become data focused, companies struggle to organize, track, and collect data so that it can be analyzed for valuable insights because they aren’t focused on what questions they are trying to answer, but rather just collecting and analyzing as much data as possible.
One myth about data collection and data analytics is that all companies need to do is write complex algorithms to feed into a dashboard. To really tap into business insights and make data collection meaningful, it requires a human touch. Understanding what story, the leader wants to tell or the questions that need answered will drive what data needs to be collected and analyzed. This is where the human components come in.
Turning an executive’s words into a meaningful dashboard is what we do best. Sure, anyone can purchase flashy software and take a stab in the dark at building Tableau graphs and charts with just any data, but knowing what data needs to be analyzed is driven by knowing the questions you are trying to answer. This was probably the biggest learning curve for me when I began my journey in metrics and analytics.
Early on in my journey, I invested my time researching and reading articles and all I could really find was articles on cool new software. The problem is that all analytics products are great at providing pretty charts and graphics, but what they lack is the ability to tell your story from start to finish. They certainly can’t consult with you on ways to reach your goals. This is the reason why we started a Metrics and Analytics service.
We become partners with our clients and help them improve and reach their goals. Software products don’t tell you what data to collect to build the most valuable dashboards. It all goes back to understanding questions you are trying to answer. We tell our clients and potential clients; your dashboards are only as good as the underlying data. You cannot go back in time and collect accurate data. Building correct tracking and collection leads to accurate analysis. Therefore, as part of our Metrics & Analytics service we make sure you are collecting accurate and useful data.
As you can see, making data collection simple really comes down to understanding the questions you are trying to answer. If you are struggling with this, reach out to me. I would love to setup a consultation on how we can help your company. Next week we tackle the struggles with Data Visualization and telling a story.
