What You Need to Know About Data Effectiveness
In terms of your organization’s workflows, there are two ways to think about data. First, how can you use business data more efficiently, and second, how can you use data more effectively? That means that just because you’re using data more efficiently, you aren’t necessarily using that data more effectively—and vice versa. We spend a lot of time talking about data efficiency, but in this post, we’re going to take a step back to focus on data effectiveness.
What Is Data Effectiveness?
When you’re looking for ways to use data more efficiently, the question ultimately becomes: How can you use your data system to help your team get more done in less time? Using data more effectively, on the other hand, comes down to pinpointing which processes and workflows could benefit from more data, automation, or even fewer data resources.
Ultimately, the implications of data effectiveness offer a striking reminder that data for the sake of data is not always a good thing. Some problems can’t be solved with more data, even when it’s used more efficiently, and that’s where data effectiveness comes into play.
The Importance of Data Effectiveness
When you begin factoring data effectiveness into the decision-making formula, you can start identifying which data is worth collecting and streamlining in the first place. With this in mind, you need to first take a look at the systems your organization uses to collect, manage, and store data.
Let’s say an organization is still relying on an expanding framework of spreadsheets to handle business data. While spreadsheets are an excellent way for businesses to hit the ground running—in this sense, they can be great for prioritizing data efficiency—they can also present specific challenges as an organization grows.
For example, as a business attempts to scale data management on spreadsheets, they can experience performance issues when too much data is collected on one document. Similarly, when users don’t all have access to the same spreadsheets, data can be misrepresented, mistakes can be made, and sharing data becomes difficult. When this happens, the merits of the data efficiency offered by spreadsheets are quickly outweighed by the setbacks of data ineffectiveness: Your team doesn’t always have access to data when they need it, and network administrators can’t control user access controls.
How Relational Data Management Can Help
If your organization is looking for ways to prioritize data effectiveness, implementing a relational data management platform offers an ideal place to start. That’s because a relational database allows you to take complex tables of data and access or reassemble them in a variety of ways without having to reorganize the tables themselves.
That means you can not only store and manage complex data with a relational database; your team can also gain deeper insights into that data by analyzing the context out of which it arises while simultaneously pairing it with other data. In short, you’re able to use complex data to make connections in a way that you can’t with spreadsheets alone.
Start Prioritizing Data Effectiveness With Skeleton Key
Has your organization only pursued efficiency for the sake of efficiency up until now? The experts at Skeleton Key can help. We specialize in developing custom business software that opens up new possibilities for achieving new levels of data efficiency and effectiveness across your organization. Learn more about our workplace productivity solutions or contact our team today to start exploring your options.
