Melissa UK Team | United Kingdom

Last month, we spoke about big data and the importance of leveraging such data to provide insights to drive better-informed business decisions. But at what point does this data become useless?

As we mentioned, big data provides detailed insight as it draws upon information from a number of sources and data points and thus, big data can reveal new opportunities, insights on customer behaviour and forecast changes in the industry, all of which will help an organisation’s success. Nevertheless, this data can turn sour and it is important that firms are able to leverage big data before it comes into bad data.

How do we prevent big data from becoming sour?

There is no recipe for preventing big data from becoming useless because eventually the value of data will expire as the industry grows and customer preferences change. What firms can do, however, is stay on top of their data by preventing bad data from entering their systems and analysing their big data in a timely manner.

Collection of data is important but gathering too much data can lead to the collection of bad data, which will crowd databases. Staying on top of data refers to firms prioritising the data that they collect and being able to streamline and analyse this data using a clear and concise data strategy. It is also important that data is analysed in a timely manner – research shows that over the year, 25% of data becomes inaccurate due to various reasons and so firms should actively seek to use their data to provide insight as soon as they can.

The majority of bad data comes from the fact that firms are dealing with more and more data but not verifying such data. As organisations are capturing more data than ever, the likely chance of this data capture being unorganised is higher than ever. Unorganised data is linked to unverified and unstructured data which is much harder to analyse and use for customer insights. It also creates a lot of time wastage as data analysts are forced to restructure such data before the data can be properly used. This data is thus bad data and prevents the ability of big data to drive customer success.

Where do we start?

Good data has the ability to drive success and in order to generate good data from big data, firms need to ask the right questions. What data do we hold? Is this data accurate and up to date? Has this data been verified? The underlying data that organisations already hold can be the cause of bad data and so firms need to address this before they can look to using their data for insights and business decisions.

The solution to this is similar – a tailored data quality solution which helps to monitor data that is already held as well as new data captured. Interested in finding out more? You can speak to the team on 020 7718 0070 or via email at info.uk@melissa.com.

If you are interested in continuing the conversation, please connect with us on Twitter.