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How Unified Data Works in Driving Growth for Businesses Today
Doing business in the modern world requires handling a constantly increasing amount of data. This is especially true for organizations that rely on a large number of applications, including local and cloud applications.
Across all sectors, success in the era of Big Data requires robust management of a huge amount of data from multiple sources. Whether you are running a video chat app, an outbound contact center, or a legal firm, you will face challenges in keeping track of overwhelming data.
Managing and keeping track of all of this data is not easy. Plus, technological and administrative solutions of the past are no longer up to the task. While organizing data effectively can be difficult, the rewards of doing so can be significant.
Effective data management can streamline business processes, avoid mistakes, strengthen customer relations, and ultimately drive business growth.
Unification of data is the first step toward maximizing the value of your organization’s data. This guide will explore what unified data is, its benefits, and how you can create a unified data management system.
What are the drawbacks of disconnected data?
To define unified data, it is helpful first to understand its opposite—disconnected or disjointed data. Disconnected data is fragmented data that is not incorporated into a single environment.
For example, if you are measuring engagement with your organization’s Facebook posts but not measuring this data alongside that for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, as well as mass email campaigns, this data is disconnected.
Of course, all data can be useful, and isolating this data (at least temporarily) can be essential for analytics, but it is usually best for it to also be part of a larger dataset—in this case, the performance of your social media marketing strategy as a whole.
With this data fragmented, you can only analyze the performance of your Facebook strategy on its own. With this data unified, you can see how it contributed to your overall strategy. Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle—each piece is part of a collective whole which gives a bigger picture.
You only need to read any marketing or affiliate marketing forum to know that many organizations struggle with disconnected data. But this is not just an issue for marketing departments—all operational divisions may suffer due to the lack of unification of data.
Disconnected data can lead to incorrect insights and poor operational process decisions. Security and privacy issues arise more often when data is disconnected. This can be catastrophic for organizations in all sectors.
What is unified data?
Unification of data is when fragmented data sources are merged into a single repository, known as a “data warehouse.” For example, multiple datasets can be consolidated into one database.
There is no “one size fits all” strategy or technology for achieving data unification, and the process can entail multiple steps, processes, and pieces of software. However, the end goal is typically to streamline data management and ultimately reduce the number of applications, platforms, or other “places” data is collected and stored—many organizations find that they have been using duplicate tools and have duplicate data.
Unified data enables a much more accurate and useful overview of an organization’s data. An effective unified data management (UDM) strategy typically involves multiple individuals working to create a more organized and useful system.
Unified data is related closely to the technical concept of a Single Source of Truth (or SSoT). An SSoT is a single location where data has been aggregated from disparate systems and is understood to be an immutable reference point regarding this data.
An SSoT works as an authority on data and can make sure that every individual that accesses and works with an organization’s data is “on the same page.”
In practice, this can be achieved using traditional databases, newer technologies such as blockchain, or combinations of tools. An effective UDM strategy requires collaboration between all individuals and an understanding of organizational processes.
What are the benefits of unified data?
Unified data provides a shared space for data management and all other aspects of working with data, from analysis to auditing to optimization. It enables consistency across an entire business ecosystem, streamlining administrative processes, saving time and resources, increasing efficiency, and driving growth.
Here are some of the specific ways in which unified data can benefit organizations:
Personalization
Increasing CSAT (customer satisfaction) is an important goal for most organizations. Improving customer satisfaction requires maximizing your understanding of customers and their needs. Data is a powerful tool for doing this, especially when it is unified. Once a clear picture of a customer has been built up, you can provide a personalized experience to meet their individual requirements.
Think of eCommerce stores like Amazon. These businesses use customer data (e.g., previous purchases and reviews) to create personalized product recommendations. If a store based personalized recommendations only on a customer’s previous purchases, they may recommend products that most other customers rate poorly.
Similarly, if the store based recommendations only on reviews, they may recommend irrelevant products or products that the customer has already bought. Unifying both data sources (previous purchases and reviews) is much more accurate in creating effective personalization for that customer.
Costs
UDM can reduce business overheads by streamlining data management processes. For example, duplicate data and tools can be identified and removed, and data silos (datasets that are only accessible by one business unit or department) can also be avoided. Removing these can speed up decision-making and reduce wasted business resources.
An effective UDM platform automatically cleanses data, resulting in fewer manual interventions and operational errors. This frees up valuable time for employees to spend on more value-adding tasks. UDM is also typically cloud-based, so the costs of running local servers and other hardware can be eliminated.
Accessibility
Access management is an essential part of many operational processes. Effective UDM can enable easy access to accurate and complete data when necessary and also help restrict unauthorized access. When everything is in one place, the chances of an individual accessing sensitive data in other places are eliminated.
Hence, unified data can be a powerful tool in an organization’s security policy.
Simplification
The sheer amount of data used by many organizations can easily lead to the dreaded “data fatigue”—where data is accumulated faster than they can make use of it and obtain insights. Too much data from disparate sources can be overwhelming, making data management, optimization, and analysis virtually impossible.
For example, hosted phone solutions may deal with many thousands of calls a day, with data on duration and phone numbers being created constantly.
UDM can simplify data and enable effective management, even when data is accumulated thick and fast. Data can be processed and stored in a single repository for easier management.
Compliance
Because data is such a valuable commodity, laws and regulations regarding its use are constantly being developed. Data protection laws vary worldwide, so it’s important to ensure your organization complies with all the applicable laws.
Auditing for data protection compliance can be extremely difficult when data is processed, stored, and managed across a variety of locations and platforms. A single data repository reduces the time and difficulty of carrying out audits and increases the results’ accuracy.
Analytics
Data analytics are a useful way of gaining helpful insights to optimize future business strategies. One of the most notable benefits of unified data is its use in carrying out effective analytics, as all relevant data can be analyzed together as part of a cohesive whole. Disconnected data, on the other hand, can easily result in data silos or datasets otherwise being overlooked, meaning analysis is often simply incorrect.
Marketing is a particular area where unified data can be helpful for analytics. For example, when marketers carry out RFM analysis (analysis of the recency, frequency, and monetary value of a customer’s purchases), these three components are most useful when analyzed as parts of a whole, rather than as unrelated concepts.
What does a unified data management system look like?
UDM systems vary widely across different organizations. There are many types of data repositories. There are also many other processes and tools that go into a data management system, such as data governance, data integration, business intelligence, and more. An effective UDM system incorporates all these processes and the tools used to carry them out.
Using the example of the eCommerce store, a variety of data on each customer may be processed. Analytics of the customer’s activity on the website (including times of login and purchases), their personal details, their purchase history, any reviews or feedback they have left, and more pieces of data can be collected and managed.
When unified on a single data repository, these seemingly separate pieces of data can be used to generate useful insights, carry out more effective relationship marketing, and increase customer satisfaction. For example, a customer’s feedback on purchases can help to determine their preferences and ensure that recommendations and promotional offers are relevant to them, increasing their trust in the business.
What are the components of an effective unified data management system?
While an effective UDM system can vary from business to business, there are two main foundational components that it needs:
Data management coordination: The technical infrastructure (which may comprise of various different applications, software, and tools) must be effectively coordinated to streamline data management processes across an organization.
Business objective support: The people and policies that make up an organization must align with the technical infrastructure used for data management. Employees must understand goals and processes and how to use the technical infrastructure to carry these out.
How to overcome the challenges of setting up a unified data management system
To set up an effective UDM system, there are some common challenges that every organization must overcome.
For example, some data architecture is insufficiently flexible, and changing data when necessary is difficult. Choosing the most suitable tools to make up your technical infrastructure is essential. This is especially true in a sector that requires live monitoring of variable data. Cloud-based platforms and flexible policies can be key here.
Another common issue is that most business data is difficult to find and use for analysis. Creating a “discovery layer”—a searchable index of your organization’s resources – can solve this problem.
Perhaps the most important challenge when it comes to data management is compliance. It is not easy to balance achieving a 360 customers’ view while keeping their personal information safe and secure. When it comes to ensuring data protection compliance, legislation can still be complex and difficult to understand entirely.
Therefore, it’s important to liaise with data governance experts to ensure compliance when designing a UDM system.
The future of unified data
As businesses expand globally, their potential data sources increase for UDM systems to incorporate. For example, an eCommerce store may have domains worldwide, from a US domain to a NZ domain, to source website analytics data.
The Internet of Things (or IoT) also means that more and more internet-capable devices are becoming potential data sources. The increase in the use of 5G will magnify this trend. Data management systems will have to adjust to these changes, and unified data is likely to become less of a beneficial extra and more of an essential component of doing business.
Effective data integration has a plethora of beneficial effects on business operations, and unified data is the foundation of this.
Authors:
Junaid Baig
