Whether data is structured or unstructured, it’s only as valuable as the business outcomes it makes possible. However, the data itself isn’t the only factor responsible for those outcomes. How you measure that data, from a business point of view, helps you tie the value of the data to its potential and supports decisions that lead to positive business results. To get there, you need a big data analytics platform.
Once you have a platform that can measure along the four V’s—volume, velocity, variety, and veracity—you can then extend the outcomes of the data to impact customer acquisition, onboarding, retention, upsell, cross-sell and other revenue generating indicators. You can also look at this information as a competitive strategy that brings corresponding improvements in operational efficiency and helps you leverage data across the enterprise for other initiatives.
Over the last decade or so, companies have invested a lot of money in building data warehouses and business intelligence systems to secure data’s critical role in improving decision making capabilities. I call this the “definitive value of data.” It addresses the importance associated with every single data item that goes into these systems and every single report you generate out of the data that is, for the most part, structured data.
