Data Analytics

How to Overcome Fragmented Data Sources

It’s likely to be obvious, but a critical part of your plan to gain insights is identifying your data sources and the tools you’ll use for data assessment.

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Data falls into two distinct categories. Structured and unstructured data sources.

Structured data

This is the most easy to analyse – this is data found in spreadsheets and databases, and other simply organised information.

Unstructured data

Today’s businesses are struggling with an increasing amount of unstructured data such as mobile, social, photos, videos, devices, sensors and more. The massive volume of data is known as ‘big data’. It’s not just the volume of data that has expanded it’s the velocity and variety that has intensified too.

“85% of today’s data is automatically generated from devices and sensors” says Rebecca Lambert, Editor, Onwindows Magazine, from Microsoft.

Big data has the potential to give organisations the edge they need to get ahead. Despite the huge potential relatively few companies have mastered the data science behind using big data effectively.

For businesses to make progress, overcome fragmented data sources, and react to trends in the external environment, they need to address three main challenges:

  • Find the right software – to store, process and analyse the massive data volumes
  • Create a data culture – where employees can access and use data to make informed business decisions
  • Build and deploy software applications – that will embed intelligence derived from the data.

To overcome fragmented data sources we would….

Help your company analyse their information and better prepare their data. A dashboard would be created to help visualize and track the information more effectively.

Additionally, we would suggest creating a single source of information. Objective can aggregate multiple data sources in a data warehouse.

Complex reports using the likes of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can then be developed to deliver the insights that corporate managers need. Or, Power BI can be applied to interrogate data with natural language queries to produce interactive reports in real time.

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