The next century natural resource is something you deal with everyday. With millions of pieces of data being collected around the world in every industry, how are you refining yours? This series of blog posts will cover defining, refining, and utilizing your data.
Data is the Next Century Natural Resource
Data is continuously collected from millions of data points around the globe each day. What is the purpose of your data collection? With a mounting collection of data, refining methods for efficient and effective utilization have to be explored and implemented. How are you refining your biggest natural resource?
From Defining to Refining
Often times the data structure isn't ideal for refinement for efficient utilization of the data. Even more common is that the data could be collected in a manner that would reduce the need for refining or limit the amount of refining that had to occur. For instance you can restrict the input of data to a specific format to standardize the format of the data using methods to validate the entry. Alternatively you can provide a limited field by providing options from a drop down list.
Refining data means clean data. Audit often.
Refining also means having to explore the utilization of your data. What purpose does the data collection serve and is the data collected meeting that purpose? Are you collecting data that you aren't using or planning on using? Why? Stay tuned for another post in this series on refining your biggest natural resource.