How Dark is Your Data?
A recent survey of our galaxy by astronomers with VERA in Japan has shown that Earth is both moving faster and is closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy than previously thought (EarthSky, December 2020). But don’t worry, our planet is safe! And also, don’t worry, this article is not about astronomy. Just realize that black holes are an interesting singularity in space where light and matter is apparently disappearing. Scientists talk about disappearing ’information’ which is considered an impossibility. So in reality, that information disappears from our capability to observe it.
From that point of view, a black hole has a lot of similarities with what is happening with enterprise data.
While we are capturing more and more data in our databases, an estimated 55% becomes ‘dark data’ that is never used for any further purpose (other than filling up disk space). Some sources mention 90% of dark data in our systems.
So only between 10% and 45% of the data we are capturing is useful. At least that is what the average numbers show today. It does not mean that in dark data, there is no potential value. And it also does not mean that your company cannot do better than using only 45% of your data.
Golden Light in the Darkness
In my previous blog post ‘Data is the New Gold’, I highlighted the increasing value of data and that companies must secure and exploit the value of the data they own. Recently, I ran into another nice example of how the value of data can come from unexpected sources: an insurance company discovered that it could monetize its daily numbers of new car insurances. Investment managers are willing to pay for those numbers because it gives them an early indication about car sales. The official car sales numbers from OEMs only become available at the month-end and therefore the insurance data has a timing advantage that helps investment managers make decisions about investments in car manufacturing.
It is certain that also in your company’s data there are such hidden gems, maybe data you can monetize, and more surely new insights for the management to make better decisions and the company to become more competitive.
Regardless if you are an IT manager, a line manager or an executive manager, the quest for those new insights using all of your data, should already be high on your agenda.
Choosing Your Battles
There are thousands of areas where new gold could be found, so before you start digging you must have a strategy in determining what you hope to find. Rather than starting from what you already know about your business, you should start by asking questions about areas or dimensions that you don’t know. Start a question with ‘what if I would know …’ and complete that with things you don’t know today. For example ‘what if I would know how many interruptions in a production process took longer than 10 minutes?’ or ‘what if I would know the curve of electricity consumption in each work center during a week?’ For each question, think about the advantage the knowledge could give you and give that a value score. The more of these questions you can come up with and the less you can guess the answers, the better. Eventually, you will end up with a top list of insights that you are missing today with the highest potential business value.
Setup for Success
Once you know your target insights, think about how you can get them. You can send an email to someone on your team asking to search for the information you need. You have a good team, so you can expect the answer the next day. Most of the time your team’s answers are reliable. But will they remain reliable if you keep asking that same question over and over? Will you not be creating extra workload for your team that could be avoided?
A better way to get insights is by using an analytics solution that will provide you insights in a sustainable way. The main objects in such a solution are the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), metrics that show the answers to your questions that can be linked together in overviews or dashboards.
There exist many industry standard KPIs, so it is useful to check if your specific target insights have a match with some of those standard KPIs. You can do a web search for that and it will probably give you more ideas on how to fine-tune your insights.
If you are lucky, the analytics solution that your company has in place also has standard KPIs available, giving you the answers you are looking for right away. With its Adaptive ERP, QAD has embedded analytics that offer more than 350 predefined standard KPIs in all areas of the business:
- Purchasing Inventory Effectiveness
- Fixed Assets
- Inventory Data Health
- Production On Time and In Full
- CRM
- Sales and Customer Service
- Finance
With a self-service analytics solution, it is also possible to create new KPIs without programming or SQL knowledge, straight from the existing Adaptive ERP dataviews where you can define aggregations, calculations and visualizations tailored to your business cases.
An embedded analytics solution also has the advantage that you can drill down to the underlying detailed transactions of the ERP with at the same time the full security of the ERP applied.
As a last tip for your quest for insights: with each new project that you start, also think of how you can best measure its success. Put the KPIs with their targets as goals upfront, not as an afterthought, so that you can genuinely measure the impact and the success of your projects.
Let’s go digging for that gold!
