In the current competitive business environment, businesses are seeking ways to become more efficient, and more able to anticipate and meet client needs. Running an efficient and profitable business requires a holistic views of the various departments, customers, suppliers, the efficiency of their interactions. Having that complete picture enables a business to make decisions that are effective, timely and profitable and position them stronger to make more successful decisions.
Various elements of a business produce and require information. The ability to provide the best service or product depends on the flow, control and visibility of this information. Inefficiencies creep in when the various elements of a business use different software applications or methods of storing information. This typically induces extreme difficulty in accessing and analyzing the information and also becomes costly. Often there are duplications of effort across different databases, costs incurred by multiple software licenses, and data protection issues.
Data consolidation is the process of putting all an organization’s data in one integrated place. The process requires lots of study and steps to be put in place to extract the information from multiple formats and locations. And this requires lots of consulting effort, analysis and necessary software to be bought/built.
Data standardization is the process of converting data to a common format to enable better analysis of the data. Most organizations utilize data from a number of sources; this can include basic spreadsheets, structured or unstructured databases, data warehouses, lakes, cloud storage, etc. However, data from such disparate sources can be problematic if it isn’t uniform, leading to difficulties in utilizing them to derive meaningful information. (e.g., to produce dashboards and visualizations, etc.).
Data standardization is crucial for many reasons. First of all, it helps establish clear, consistently defined elements and attributes, providing a comprehensive catalog of your data. Whatever insights you’re trying to get or problems you’re attempting to solve, properly understanding of data is a crucial starting point.
Getting there involves converting that data into a uniform format, with logical and consistent definitions. These definitions will form your metadata — the labels that identify the what, how, why, who, when, and where of your data. That’s the basis of your data standardization process.
From an accuracy perspective, standardizing the way you label data will improve access to the most relevant and current information. This will help make your analytics and reporting easier. Security-wise, mindful cataloging forms the basis of a powerful authentication and authorization approach, which will apply security restrictions to data items and data users as appropriate.
The benefits to the business from Data consolidation and Standardization far outweigh the cost and effort. They include :
- Concise and accurate information for the Management
- Having data all in one place improves productivity and efficiency
- Operating costs are usually reduced
- It is easier to meet data protection laws and requirements
- You can use better customer data to create closely targeted campaigns.