Get the Most Out of Enterprise Data with Digital Solutions
You’ve got enterprise data, now what?
Enterprise data is more than a buzzword, it’s something your business likely already has. The question is, what are you doing with it? And more importantly, are you making the data work best for your business? Whether you have a storefront, a fleet of contractors, or run a business from a remote location, you have enterprise data. The next step is putting that data to use.
What Is Enterprise Data?
Enterprise data is a pretty broad term that covers all the information your team members and processes gather. It could be HR information about your own employees, sales information from customers, and even marketing efforts spent on potential clients. Everything your team tracks, and everything you want your colleagues to know, counts as enterprise data.
Is it Supposed to Do Something?
All by itself, enterprise data doesn’t do much. It’s simply information. It’s what you do with the data: where you store it and how you leverage it for future decisions that makes it powerful. If you’re not using your data to the fullest, don’t fret. Forrester has recently cited that up to 73% of enterprise data goes unused. Now’s your chance to hop off that data-neglect bandwagon and put your data to work. A great place to start is using your data to view past trends in preparation for the future.
For example, a restaurant switched to a digital platform for reservations. After using the new software for six months, they can look back and see that Friday and Saturday nights tend to yield the most reservations. But they see that most reservations are made on Wednesdays. That information is part of their enterprise data.
With that information in mind, they now have the ability to do several things, such as:
Test advertising weekly specials on social media on Wednesdays
Make informed supply orders based on average reservation numbers
Adjust employee schedules to accommodate reservation predictions
All that information (the food orders, staff schedules, actual number of reservations, social media analytics) also becomes a part of their enterprise data too. As you can imagine, it piles on quickly!
For industries that work in the digital space, it can compound even faster. And without a way to review the data in one synchronized place, the data isn’t very helpful. For our restaurant example, let’s say they had been tracking reservations on paper for years before they invested in a software system to do it for them. They already had those trends recorded. But without a system in place, it would have required one person to manually tally up all the reservations from books upon books of historical reservations. While it’s valuable information, that’s not a practical method to analyze it.
“On average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics.”
Does My Data Need to Be Digital?
Much like the restaurant above, no! Your data can come in many different forms. One issue with having paper or tangible enterprise data is that it requires storage space as well as time from people to compile and analyze it. Alternatively, digital data gives you unlimited cloud storage, access, and immediate analysis.
When you move your data to a digital space, and you have a single point of access to retrieve it all, you make the data useful and actionable. Actionable is the key here. You can look at numbers on a spreadsheet all day, but unless you’re using it to guide decisions or tests for your business, you’re not getting as much out of it as you can. A report by Accenture noted that data-driven organizations see an average annual growth of 30%, which seems like a great reason to be doing something with your data.
How Do I Start Digitizing?
Getting started with digital solutions is easier now than ever before. Depending on your industry, there are hundreds of tools and options available to make your transition as smooth as possible. One important thing to keep in mind is that there will be a learning curve for any digital solution you choose. Solutions that offer top-tier customer service and onboarding assistance are out there; don’t settle for one that won’t give you the support you need.
The beginning of a digital transformation is just like any other business decision you’ve made: it requires research. Start by pinpointing your biggest business issues and data capture points, and then start investigating solutions that can address those challenges. Most reputable software solutions come with a free trial too, so you can always test out the platform to see how it will work for you and your team.
For this example, let’s turn to the construction industry. On a typical day, they see work orders, material orders, and safety inspections. Most likely, they’re using paper forms or possibly PDFs to track all this information, both of which require manual entry of the information to start digitally analyzing trends. One option for this company would be to look into a digital forms solution that can automatically port all of their form data directly into a digital space. Bonus points if that data can then integrate with any other system they use (like billing, cloud storage, or project management software).
What’s the Importance of Enterprise Data Integrations?
As you’ve already seen, enterprise data can encompass an array of different information. The key is putting the data to work for you. When you combine these digital solutions (and the data within them) into actionable information, you’re “integrating” them. It’s just another way to say that you’re sending information from one platform to another.
Enterprise data integrations become the most valuable when they bring essential information in front of you in one location. This could be a spreadsheet, a project management solution, or even an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform. The integrated data gives you a much better picture and helps you differentiate between correlation and causation. Correlation can happen for any number of reasons, but causation is when there’s a specific factor that drives a change in something else. When all of your business data is brought together in a single platform, you can begin to see specific causation factors. Those factors can then help guide your business decisions.
“Data-driven organizations with an enterprise strategy are actually growing at an average of more than 30% annually.”
How Do I Keep My Data Secure?
Enterprise data can be secured and protected behind encryption with any good software solution. In most cases, storing data digitally keeps it more secure than trying to store and protect hard-copy or paper information. But there’s more to security than storage. Data security comes in many forms, from an electronic signature for online forms to tracking GPS information for your employees.
As with the construction example above, you’ll often need verification that an individual saw and reviewed a particular item. Even outside of the construction industry, maybe your team is required to authorize overtime hours or get customer signatures upon work completion. Having a way to gather that signature electronically means you don’t have to store the paper anywhere, nor rely on everything to be stored where you expect it to be.
Whatever “secure” means for your business, finding a way to digitize your enterprise data not only keeps it encrypted but also means maintaining all your records in an easy-to-find location.
How Can I Use My Data?
In short, there are limitless possibilities when it comes to using your enterprise data. The most important aspect is that you use it, but how it best fits into your workflow will depend on your business. One of the fastest ways to get started with your data is by using the Test, Analyze, Repeat method. This consists of putting your data to the test, literally.
Once you start analyzing your data you can see trends of purchases, delays, and nearly everything your business does. Use that data to run tests. If you notice trends for days of bigger purchases, adjust your marketing budget to focus on those days. If you notice safety issues on a specific day of the week, try adding additional inspections or safety checkpoints on those days. Whatever trends you see, try to create tests to solve the problems. Just remember that the best tests are small, individual changes so you can accurately measure their impacts.
At the end of the day, enterprise data is all around you through every facet of your business. Capturing that data, gathering meaningful analytics, and implementing changes and tests to improve your company should be the foundation behind digitizing your enterprise data. It can give you visual aids to see how far you’ve come, and accurately predict where your business is going. Starting your enterprise data journey is as simple as identifying pain points in your manual data collection and finding a digital solution to streamline it for you.
About GoFormz
GoFormz is a digital forms solution that helps bring your data into a single, actionable place. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms online and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. Whether you need a medical history form template or forms for inventory tracking, GoFormz can bring your processes to the digital realm. Complete with an open API and multiple native integrations, you can rest assured that your data is always ready, whenever you need it.
