Matt Baker, senior vice president of corporate strategy at Dell Technologies, says that the right amount of data can quench a business's thirst for insights, power its growth, and carry it to success. Data is not good or bad. Is it useful for the purpose at hand? It is difficult to get the data to align in an inclusive way. It has to be organized in a way that makes it usable, secure, and reliable.
Many organizations are overwhelmed by data, according to a recently commissioned study of more than 4,000 decision-makers conducted on Dell Technologies.
According to the research company, the world generated 64.2% of its total data in 2020. That is enough storage for 60 billion video games or 7.5 trillion mp3 songs.
70% of business leaders are accumulating data faster than they can use it, according to a study by Forrester. Although executives have enormous amounts of data, they don't have the means to extract insights or value from it.
The amount of data is growing fast. Every app, gadget, and digital transaction creates a data stream, and those streams flow together to generate even more data streams. There is a potential future scenario in Baker. A loyalty app on a customer's phone tracks her visit to an electronics store. The app uses a camera or a proximity sensor to understand where the customer is and then taps into the information the retailer already has about the customer to predict what she might buy. As she passes a particular aisle, the app will give her a special offer on ink for her printer or a controller for her game box. It notes which offers result in sales, remembers for the next time, and adds the whole interaction to the retailer's ever-growing pile of sales and promotion data, which then may entice other shoppers with smart targeting.
There is a mass of legacy data. Most organizations do not have the luxury of building their own data systems. They may have years worth of data that needs to be cleaned. A customer's birth date could be stored in half a dozen different formats. It seems impossible to achieve clean, useful data when hundreds of data fields are involved.
Abandoning old data means abandoning valuable insights. Historical data on warehouse stocking levels and customer ordering patterns can be used to create a more efficient supply chain. Load capabilities designed to tidy up disparate data sources are essential tools.
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