In a perfect world, enterprises wouldn’t be struggling with mountains of data nor having problems extracting value from data. But it isn’t a perfect world and enterprises are struggling with these problems.

According to Mike O’Rourke, IBM’s VP for business analytics there are some kinds of data that get valuable over time. However, not all data adds value to the business. In that case, it’s necessary to select only desired data, and then either store it or analyze it.

In this post, we will discuss ways to make valuable data more valuable and discard data that’s not important.
One of the most significant problems in data is ‘poor data hygiene; it means that your data is not correctly tagged, stored or structured. So even if you have essentially stored all data, you are not going to find it and it will add no value to your business. So the first step should be structuring your data. Docsvault Document Management  Software can help you by structuring your data ensuring this doesn’t happen to you.

Adding Value - Docsvault

Once that is done, the next step is to monetize your data. 2% of all customer data becomes stale monthly, for an annual rate of 25%. Imagine how much useless data that is!

In order to do prevent this from happening in your organization, you need to understand the various stages your data follows until it becomes valuable. From raw data to processed data through to insightful data, understanding your data life cycle is very important to ensure you add value and not data. Let us take the example of CRM data and go through its life cycle to understand it better.

2% of all customer data becomes stale monthly, for an annual rate of 25%.

  1. All the email contacts, conversations, forms, contracts, and emails you receive from your customers form a part of raw data.
  2. When you store it in a structured way complete with profiling and notes, you reach the second stage of the data life cycle where it becomes processed data.
  3. The third stage is data insights where you start extracting information from data through various analytics tools and reports.
  4. So it is very important you monetize your data by implementing changes or improvements based on insights received from reports.

Dr. Catherine Havasi has said something very helpful on the topic of using data from CRM for deeper probing. According to her analyzing your CRM data in terms of ‘analyzing rep in emails, phone call notes, and other data can help you figure out what went wrong and make concrete recommendations about how to restart the customer’s journey towards a purchase, potentially even catching and stopping problems before they start. 

Do this exercise regularly and leach out all value from your data until it becomes redundant. Once that is done, you can go on to remove redundant data. Docsvault Document Management Software offers several features like email archiving, records retention, etc. that take care of removing unnecessary data. However, make sure you are thorough with all applicable compliance laws before you do that!

We hope you are making good use of all these tools and ensuring all the data in your organization is adding value to your business. Remember to purge your repository from time to time removing all data that is not useful.