Source: enterprisetalk.com
There is an enormous amount of data available for companies for business insights and analysis. Businesses now have tools to enable them to aggregate them into a meaningful report in order to use it for decision making. Combining big data in a meaningful way is tricky – but bigger brands are tackling it well.
A majority of organizations are aiming for a data-driven approach, and are seeing success in their efforts. According to a study by Dell EMC (back in 2014), there would be 1.7 megabytes of data produced in 2020 – for every person and in every second.
Businesses need to follow proven practices for data aggregation to reduce related data management challenges. A major issue is ensuring that they are running on the raw insights, and organizations can accomplish it by structuring and normalizing data. Thus, to begin with, the top methodologies need to be executed.
Basically, businesses need to realize their short-term and long-term analytics objectives. For instance, currently, a company could be trying to know its consumers’ buying preferences. After a while, it may want to aggregate data from different sources to identify audiences’ interests – in order to sell insightfully. Regardless of the purposes, there is likely to be an immediate and long-term focus that will alter the business’ data aggregation requirements. And the strategy should reflect it.
For organizations that purchase data from third parties, they need to ensure that their privacy standards and governance are compatible. In this case, healthcare data would be a great example. While acquiring patient data from an external source for sensitive issues for the purpose of analysis or treatment, the data needs to be in an anonymous format. This is to secure the privacy of such patients.
Furthermore, businesses need to determine how data will be accumulated and how the users will be accessing it. The aggregated data can be used by specific functional areas in a company or by different departments across the board. This is a critical factor because it indicates the best choice- whether the company has chosen to aggregate and keep data in a vast data repository with various access choices – or in a small database that is customized to the need of a specific user group.
In its essence, automating data integration will help. No matter where the data is being aggregated, organizations will require a straightforward way – to vet and integrate the data into the target data source. The necessity of having to hand-code the data integration interface needs to be avoided. Hence, the preferred tactics for data integration are generally processed via standard APIs and automated integration solutions tools – in order to perform secure data integration for business functionalities.