The right and legal ways to use data are more or less for improving business operations and services, with efforts to stamp out misuse. When utilized correctly, data is a powerful and invaluable tool, from improving business prospects to better company-wide security systems. Collecting data is relatively simple but must be done with consent and legally. Yet data is always valuable, from using it for fact-checking to making high-level business decisions.
Improving Your Career Prospects
Often, data is mostly used for external operations that don’t relate to yourself. But why not? You are a walking tablet of data that can be used by others, and you can also use this data for yourself. For example, you can take self-assessment surveys to highlight your strengths and weaknesses. You can then present these to your employer for a better property developer salary, for example, where your data, such as sales and project completion, is recorded.
Legal Ways to Use Data and Collect It
There are many companies that collect and store data, and there are numerous ways of doing this. What is done with the data varies from use case to use case, but collected data is often used online. Online data is collected via first-party consensual data like email addresses and third-party data from web activity such as cookies. Some of the most popular avenues of data collection include social media, online surveys, and using AI tools to track customer journeys.
Comparing Data for Accuracy
It can be hard to really say how valuable the data you hold actually is. This is often because there are variations in how data is collected, as mentioned above, leading to inaccuracy and discrepancies. As a result, you can often have bad data in your systems, something that is estimated to be at around 25%. Therefore, it is vital that you make efforts to analyze, verify, and highlight the relevancy of any data you hold, or you could end up making costly decisions.
Gaining Valuable Sector Insights
Gaining insights from your data can help you get an immediate advantage over competition in business or on a work-based professional level. This is why data is so valuable and why most companies hire expert data analysts who can leverage it. Of course, data must be obtained legally and adhere to international laws such as GDPR. So, before using data for insights, it is in your best interests to query where it comes from, how it is analyzed, and confidentiality issues.
Expanding Your Business Capabilities
Data is collected and stored all the time. The latest figures suggest that this amounts to around 330 million terabytes each day. However, this data needs to be stored, and you may not be aware that this can be very expensive. It is worth it to expand capabilities in the following ways:
1. Expand data across all compartments within the company, such as IT and operations.
2. Use any data you have to form KPIs and highlight datasets which to measure against.
3. Open up data to employees for self-service analytics where they can make insights.
4. Incorporate datasets with advanced AI tools for specific purposes related to your sector.
5. Use data to slowly teach employees how to improve data literacy across the board.
6. Align any data with strategies for business, such as your Go-to-Market expansion.
7. Progress towards a data-driven culture that relies on accuracy in your sector.
It goes without saying, but a large investment in your IT departments is a great first step to handling the data you have. This way, you can roll out data-driven processes across multiple departments that can eventually work hand in hand with It and analytics for enhanced ops.
Improved Representation via Data
Data analysis is a very professional sector and requires capable employees with the right skills. But this can often confuse other employees who don’t share the same skillset. Therefore, large sets of numbers, although valuable, don’t mean much to someone who cannot understand them. This is where visualization comes in. You can use data using tools like Datawrapper to form charts and graphs that pretty much anyone in a meeting will be able to understand.
Making Actionable Decisions
If data is excellent for one thing, it is insight. But what is the use of gleaning insights from data? You can use the insights you made to help you form actionable decisions moving forward. This could be a business merger, finding the right job application, or finding new suppliers. Data that sits there and does nothing for you is essentially useless. What’s the point of collecting it if you don’t use it? For example, you would keep customer insights in mind for marketing strategies.
Employees and Legal Ways to Use Data
Resignations from companies are at an all-time high. There are various reasons for this, but companies are using data to form strategies for employee retention. Data systems that integrate with HR departments are becoming standard across many sectors. These allow you to monitor employee performance, recruitment, and training and even decide when to increase employee salaries. Some popular HRMS apps include BambooHR, Zenefits, and Zoho Corporation.
Improving Company-Wide Cybersecurity
Risk management is more vital than ever before. It was high before COVID but has been even higher and climbing since. And among the biggest risks to a modern company is cybersecurity. Cybersecurity should be taken seriously by everyone, and your reputation, customer livelihoods, and employee or proprietary data are at risk. Data analytics can help with cybersecurity by identifying risks, assessing them for priority, and detailing some of the likely implications.
Summary
Improving your personal career prospects and making job changes are the right and legal ways to use the data available to you. From a business point of view, data can be used across all departments to improve capabilities across the company, such as developing KPIs related solely to your market. Yet, at the ground level, data analysis can help your HR department with everyday employee management and makes it easier to factor risk in relation to cybersecurity.
