From the period 2010 to 2020, the amount of data created, copied, captured, and consumed globally has increased from 1.2 trillion gigabytes to a whopping 59 trillion gigabytes. This is almost equivalent to 5000% growth in a decade! (Source: Forbes)
Many researchers have illustrated that a majority of companies leverage only a small portion of the total data available, leaving behind a significant chunk of unanalyzed data. This also results in lost business opportunities and revenues. Are you one of these organizations? Data processing is one of the smart ways to leverage the power of data and make your business thrive.
Given the enormous volumes of data generated every day and the complexities involved in handling it, business data processing becomes an indispensable task for organizations, irrespective of their size or verticals. Wondering why? Read on to know what data processing is, what best practices are, and why must stakeholders outsource their data processing tasks.
Understanding Data Processing
Data, today, is no less than a gold mine and is present everywhere—in our phones, tablets, laptops, cars, and even in watches. With more and more volumes of data being generated daily, there arises a dire need for companies to process all this data to make sense of it.
In practice, data processing is the procedure of extracting information from raw data and converting it into a comprehensible and useful format. This enables organizations to store their data in an easily accessible format as well as draw actionable insights to make informed decisions.
Given the heterogeneous nature of data (since it comes from different sources), it must go through data analysis, data validation, data organizing, and data conversion processes to make it usable. Whether it’s a billion-dollar organization or a small company, data processing lays the foundation for making the best use of digital gold and excavating valuable information that can be put to various other uses.
Best Practices of Data Processing
Counting on the benefits of best data processing practices ensures better and informed decision-making, streamlined processes, as well as an overall increase in the quality of business standards. Cleaning, auditing, validating and verifying, reporting, and wrangling data can help management achieve their desired goals if done properly. Discrepancies must be eliminated within the data to ensure accurate and efficient outcomes.
Investing in customized data processing solutions can help you make informed business decisions and leverage your valuable assets to the fullest. Here are some of the best practices businesses must follow during the process:
- Perform an Audit
Performing regular data audits helps in finding erroneous, inaccurate, and incomplete data. This is because a data audit process involves the removal of this negative or bad data with the help of proprietary tools and automation. Sales data, customer data, marketing data, employee records as well as client data must be regularly audited to ensure their freshness and accuracy.
- Clean Data
Cleaning data at regular intervals helps in removing small errors such as those in syntax, formatting, and duplicates as well. This data clean-up process is essential to avoid uninformed and poor decision-making. It is because even the smallest of errors can cause huge blunders and data cleansing avoids this. Hence, the clean-up must be done in a smooth manner by leveraging sophisticated tools and the latest software, or by collaborating with an experienced data processing company.
- Perform Data Wrangling
The process of identifying the data requirements, the purpose of its collection, and structuring, and formatting data is known as wrangling. Apart from this, it also involves data validation and sharing, quality upliftment, as well as integration across the organization. Though data wrangling may come across as a complicated business process, it reaps quality outcomes and rich dividends in the long run.
- Verify the Data
Either automated or manual data verification is highly essential for companies. This must be done to assure that the data is accurate and up to date. It must be adequate enough to fulfill the project requirements and business objectives. Plus, data verification helps prepare information for future reference and processes. Hence, data verification must be carried out as a best practice.
- Report Data
As the name suggests, data reporting is vital to present a summary of the data. Insights and analysis must be summarized in a to-the-point and concise manner such that it is easy to interpret as well as contains all the necessary postulates. Various software can be used to generate such reports, which must be carefully reviewed, edited, and audited by experts.
Bottom Line
Outsourcing your non-core but critical online and offline data processing tasks to professionals gives you the dual benefit of enhanced operational efficiency and optimized operational expenditures. Proficient experts help businesses in capturing, extracting, digitizing, and processing data from various sources and converting it into actionable insights.
How to go ahead? You can collaborate with an experienced vendor equipped with the latest software, proprietary tools, and a rich profile of quality clients. Now that you know where to begin, now is the time to make the move.
0
