How many businesses can say they have full control over the way they process, store and use data? And what are the strategies that give those who do an advantage over those who are still struggling to master their data?
Take four diverse business sectors – Healthcare and Pharma, Government, Finance, and Logistics – whose data dilemmas are as similar as their business models are different.
You might think there are few similarities, say, between an organization that aims to deliver front line health and social care, and one that brings a multitude of goods across many national borders. And you would be wrong.
Like Government and Finance, Healthcare and Logistics all create and process masses of the kind of unstructured data found in reports and documents.
They each struggle with matters of compliance, whether that’s in terms of GDPR, rules in banking and insurance, or customs regulations.
Because of that, they all have an issue with data quality – ensuring all their information is in the right place and that there are no gaps between what the data says and what reality reveals.
Finally, they miss the big point – and that is because they struggle so much with unstructured data, they concentrate most of their time and effort collating and curating structured data and believe that’s ‘job done’.
It isn’t. And what’s worse, in concentrating so much on the structured data, they often won’t even be aware of that they’re missing.
To solve any one of those four big problems seems daunting.
But if any organization should follow one simple and cost-effective strategy to control and exploit the biggest free data source they own, it would be this: Tap into your organization’s email server.
Controversial? Not really. It’s a GDPR and compliance case, for sure, but properly anonymized and pseudonymized, the data that passes through your Exchange server is an Eldorado of information, the motherlode of business intelligence, the collective consciousness of your hive mind.
You only have to unbox that data by solving the four big problems: Be bold enough to look beyond structured data alone; exploit your unstructured data in an intelligent way; be compliant; and make data quality your benchmark.
We're planning a free webinar on how to use this strategy to control your GDPR and compliance issues. Our aim is to make the session of interest to a wide variety of organizations, so there's no registration fee and we won't be pushing a commercial message. If you would like to register for the event, follow the link ... We'll get back to you with further details in due course.
