Overwhelmed by data?

I recently came across a couple of articles that raise a common issue that organizations must address in dealing with their data: being overwhelmed. Here’s the first piece:

How To Move Forward When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed By Data

Another piece focuses on marketing data, but is relevant to the larger data discussion:

67% Of CMOs Say They Are Overwhelmed With Data

Being overwhelmed is one of the biggest problems that organizations encounter when dealing with data. More data means more possibility of insight into the workings of your business, but more data also means more infrastructure and work to manage it.

A lot of managers and executives think that if their company has a lot of reports and dashboards, they must be getting meaningful insight into their data. Too often, this is not the case.

One of the best solutions to the problem of overwhelm is, unfortunately, not a quick fix. That solution is building the right data culture in your company.

On the upside, there is an ever-growing list of tools available for working with data. But this profusion of tools can itself be a source of data overwhelm, and can present even more troublesome challenges than the mere quantity of data itself. You might need one database for your application, another for your analytical data, a tool to connect the two databases, one or more tools to transform data from raw to refined form, and other set of tools to visualize the data and produce reports. Any one of these choices might be daunting, but making them together can be downright paralyzing. Building an analytics stack involves so many different possible combinations of tools and systems that even CTOs and other high-level professionals often feel lost in making the right set of choices.

In the tech world, changes come so rapidly that what seemed the obvious solution just a few months ago can quickly become passe. It can be very difficult to distinguish between hype and lasting value - which products will actually stand the test of time, and which are simply well-marketed but will be obsolete in a year or two?

That’s why it’s so important, when developing your company’s data ecosystem, to see the big picture. Schedule a consultation today.