Five Steps to Better Data Quality In the information age, data is the calorie that drives business decisions. Just as there are good calories and bad calories, not all data is equal. As more and more companies use data to drive their decision-making processes, getting quality data is crucial to their success. Data science has been around since the 1980s, in the form of concepts such as data warehousing. If you scour the internet, looking for advice on getting better data quality, you’ll find long-standing concepts such as metrics of accuracy and timeliness along with recent tactical advice on how to sanitize data using Python or R. How do we better navigate through this dizzying array of information? Here are five steps you can take today to improve the quality of your data. Step 1: Define Your Usefulness Metrics To help managers make better decisions faster or to help employees be more responsive, you must define what “useful data” looks like. These are the most common metrics we use to define useful data: Accuracy Precision Completeness Validity Relevancy Timeliness Ability to be understood Trustworthiness Step 2: Profiling Profiling involves analyzing the data you’re working with in order to clarify its structure, content, relationships, and derivation rules. This is a crucial step for machine learning because users typically have an intuitive understanding of how data is interrelated. However, machines currently need precise instructions so it’s necessary to profile the data at hand and make it work for your user via data analysis software. To begin, you should clarify how different data points are related to one another. How do you want to group and structure them? What rules do you want to apply to the data to derive for display purposes? These steps are typical when performing a data profile. After you’ve performed in-depth profiling, you may continue to perform detailed profiling. This is because continuous detailed profiling helps determine the appropriate data for extraction and the appropriate filters to apply to your data set. After you load the data into memory, you may want to continue profiling the data to ensure that it is correctly sanitized and transformed to comply with your requirements. Step 3: Standardization Standardizing data is another crucial step for improving quality. Standards help improve communication among teams. Good communication requires the ability to deliver complex information clearly and concisely, with minimal confusion. This is true for conveying your data to your audience. There are two types of standards: external and internal. External standards (as in outside your organization) are appropriate for commonly used data types like datetime. For example, if you wanted to represent datetime, you’d choose a widely accepted international standard like ISO-8601. I’d advise you not to invent your own standards needlessly and don’t choose obscure standards. Remember, your goal is to communicate data easily and effectively. Therefore, external standards such as ISO-8601 should be chosen wisely. In some situations, you may need to create your own internal standards. It takes more work, but it is possible to do so. Internal standards also help improve communications within your company. They can also serve another purpose—for example, imagine that your business has a revolutionary process that allows you to ship twice as fast as your competitors. This is a huge competitive edge for you and will likely require the entire company to work within this revolutionary process; however, if the same vocabulary is consistently applied in the data as well then there is a good chance that your staff will stay on the same page and work within the new paradigm that has been created. Step 4: Matching or Linking If you have properly defined your data model and performed profiling, but your audience is still not getting the kind of useful insights they thought they would, then you need to add matching and linking capabilities. Recall that we talked about relationships and the structure of your data earlier, in Step 2: Profiling. You need to show your audience the relationships you discover in your data. When the relationships are in place, your audience will be able to perform a wide array of operations on the data, rolling up, drilling down, and slicing and dicing the data as they need. In other words, they’ll have business intelligence via online analytic processing. Imagine being able to analyze sales data that is tied to customers’ demographics, as well as product inventory. Now you will be able to predict trends and buy patterns based on product, transaction time, or demographics. It’s the same group of data but it can be analyzed in three different ways. Step 5: Monitoring The work of a good data analyst is never done. You need to constantly monitor the changes in the data you receive, analyze those changes and adjust your analysis accordingly. Changes may be brought about by a new competitor in the scene, or maybe there’s a change in regulation. Technology advances may also cause you to change your data analysis process. Software and data can decay, too. Continuous profiling may lead you to change your policy in order to remain competitive. New standards may need to be introduced to meet those standards. Monitoring data is crucial. If there is any doubt about the integrity of your data, it should be thoroughly checked before it is used. There are many tools available to help alleviate this workload; one example is software that sends notifications to departments responsible for collecting or sanitizing data whenever your monitoring software picks up anomalies such as wrongly inputted data. Now that you know the five steps for improving your data quality control, take note of which ones you’re already doing well and put in place a quarterly review process to ensure that you’re continually evaluating your data quality control. This way, you’ll always be seeing where you stand and where you can improve.

Competitive Analysis: How to Analyze Your Competitors to Grow Your Business When you’re running a business, it’s important to know who your competition is and what they’re up to. After all, if you don’t know what your competitors are doing, how can you stay ahead of the game? Competitive analysis is the process of identifying and assessing your competitors in order to gain insights that will help you grow your business. In this blog post, we will explore how to conduct a competitive analysis and what you can do with the information you gather.  What is Competitive Analysis? In business, competitive analysis is the process of identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to your own business. By understanding your competitors, you can develop strategies to improve your own position in the market. There are several methods you can use to perform a competitive analysis, but the most common is to look at your competitors’ marketing materials, such as their website, brochures, and product information. You can also talk to customers and learn about their experiences with different businesses. Once you have gathered this information, you can start to analyze it to identify patterns and trends. This will help you understand what makes your competitor’s products or services appealing to customers and how they are positioning themselves in the market. With this knowledge, you can adapt your own strategies to better compete in the market. Why is Competitive Analysis Important? As a business owner, it’s important to understand your competition. Why? Because if you don’t know who your competition is, how can you compete against them? How can you beat them at their own game? Competitive analysis is the process of identifying your competitors and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. This information will help you determine what strategies to use to gain market share and improve your bottom line. There are several benefits of conducting a competitive analysis, including: 1. Gaining insights into your industry: Conducting a competitive analysis will give you a better understanding of your industry as a whole. You’ll learn about new trends, technologies, and strategies that you can use to stay ahead of the curve. 2. Identifying new opportunities: A competitive analysis can help you identify new opportunities for growth. By understanding your competition, you may be able to find niches that they’re not serving or areas where they’re vulnerable. This information can help you develop strategies to capture more market share. 3. Strengthening your own strategies: Conducting a competitive analysis will also help you assess and improve upon your own business strategies. By understanding what your competition is doing well, you can make necessary adjustments to ensure that your own strategies are as effective as possible. 4. protecting your market share: If you don’t conduct a competitive analysis, you could be blindsided by a competitor How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis To properly conduct a competitive analysis, you need to have a clear understanding of your competitor’s business. This means taking the time to research their company, their product offerings, their marketing strategies, and anything else that will give you insights into how they operate. Once you have a good understanding of your competitor’s business, you can start to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you identify areas where you can improve your own business in order to better compete against them. Strengths: What does your competitor do better than you? Why do their customers choose them over you?Weaknesses: What are some areas where your competitor is falling short? What can you do to capitalize on these weaknesses?Opportunities: Are there any new markets or niches that your competitor is not serving that you could enter?Threats: What trends or changes in the marketplace could threaten your competitor’s business? How can you prepare for or counteract these threats? What to Look for in a Competitor Analysis To effectively compete in today’s market, you must understand your competition. A competitor analysis is a process businesses use to identify and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. This information can be used to improve your own business strategies. When conducting a competitor analysis, there are several factors you should look at, including: Market share: How much of the total market does your competitor control? Branding: What kind of image does your competitor project? Pricing: How does your competitor’s pricing compare to yours? Product/Service offerings: What does your competitor offer that you don’t? Or vice versa? Promotions: What kind of promotions or marketing campaigns is your competitor running? Customer service: How does your competitor treat its customers?By understanding these factors, you can develop strategies to better compete in the marketplace. How to Use Your Competitor Analysis to Grow Your Business This section will focus on how you can take your competitor analysis and use it to grow your business. Here are a few tips: 1. Use your competitor analysis to identify areas where you can improve. Is there something that your competitors are doing better than you? Use your analysis to identify these areas and make changes so that you can improve in those areas. 2. Use your competitor analysis to find new opportunities. Your competitor analysis can also help you identify new opportunities for growth. Are there areas where your competitors are not serving their customers well? This could be an opportunity for you to fill that gap and attract new customers. 3. Use your competitor analysis to inform your marketing strategy. Your competitor analysis can give you insights into how to better market your own business. What are your competitors doing that is working well? You can use this information to develop a more effective marketing strategy for your own business. Conclusion When done correctly, a competitive analysis is an incredibly valuable tool that can help you to not only understand your competitors better, but also identify areas where you can improve your own business. By taking the time to conduct a competitive analysis on a regular