Better data can help us make better decisions. In fact, 69% of companies* who leverage big data say that's the main benefit. But how?
Today businesses are tracking and storing data about their existing and potential customers from an ever-increasing number of sources, including social media, websites, customer records, and even images and videos. These sources provide different types, amounts and time periods of data.
Data analysts help their companies with business intelligence - the process of analysing data to support better, faster decision making. They join up the collected data, to interpret and transform it into meaningful insights.
For example, they might use data mining to search out patterns and relationships, to identify which marketing offers customers are responding to. Or predictive analytics could be employed to build models that forecast future customer behaviour. Data visualisation software is then used to communicate the story of the data.
Accountants can use new data-driven practices to improve the quality of budgets, plans and forecasts. Insight into the long-term viability of business strategies and improved fraud detection can directly increase top-line revenue.
But, the process must start from a true understanding of a business. How do we provide value to our customers? What are our strategic aims? We need this knowledge to enable us to ask effective questions of our data.
The next step is scrutinizing the integrity and usefulness of the data. We may need to collect new data to answer key questions.
Analysing the data is a cycle:
- We prepare the data via cleaning and formatting
- We enter the data onto our systems
- We process the data using various analytics and methodologies
- We present the data using visualisation tools
- We store the data for future use
Then, with reflection and further data collection, the process starts all over again!
Armed with the right questions, and quality datasets, accountants can empower people across the organisation, paint a more accurate and up-to-date picture of the business, and support managers to progress from good data …to great decisions.
*https://bi-survey.com/big-data-benefits, BARC, Benefits of Big Data Analytics: Increased Revenues and Reduced Costs
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