About

In this episode, we take a look at controlling your data. And what happens if you don't! Welcome everybody to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So just about everywhere you go, there is some sort of data being collected on you or about you, right? Whether you're online, walking down the street, wherever it is now, or even driving your car, right? Even, you know, your your mobile device, obviously tracking where you are. And that does sound a bit creepy, right? It brings with it a whole new set of issues. But let's talk about this principle in your business. What kind of information are you gathering in your business? So, you know, for example, do you know what information you are gathering? And do you know where that information is in your business? And do you have duplicated information in your business? And if so, which copy of that data is the correct one? Well, there are some benefits, of course, to organizing your business information. One of the reasons that we do this is to help us understand predictive activities of your customers of your costs, and even of your operational efficiencies. Now, some companies capture a lot of data about you certainly we all know things like Google or Facebook or Apple, how they use the data is really the critical topic. So you'll recall a few years ago, the Attorney General of Massachusetts announced an investigation into Facebook and the data firm, Cambridge Analytica, this was I think, back in 2018. Now, in this case, the allegation was the Facebook data was misused in a political campaign. Now, I'm not here to dispute that. But what I am here to say is that getting control of your data, hence managing it, and using it in ethical ways, to course better serve your customers and improve your business, this is the right thing to do. And that's the area that I want to focus on here with you. So what are some of the activities that you should consider to get control of your data? Well, here's a list of seven items. This comes from lead space, which I mostly agree with. So let's take a look at these seven items. One of those is very first, outline, number one, outline your business goals. All right, so you might choose to increase your sales or, or you might, you know, hey, I want to improve my decision making process in my company. Or you might say, you know, you know, what is the common theme that's taking place across across all of my customers, right, in other words, you might want to improve your customer segmentation or try to find their buying habits and patterns, or perhaps your business goal is, you know, you might want to improve your lead management or, or maybe improve the efficiency of your internal operations. I work with a lot of companies. And one of the common themes that I see across these companies is poor decision making. Now what I mean by that is, it's not that they themselves are making bad decisions, it's that there's not consistent decision making processes and therefore sometimes the decisions are great and other times, maybe not as good. So having consistent insights to guide and influence your decision making process, that's certainly a worthy goal. Alright, so that's number one. So if to get control of the data, my business, think about outlining your business goals, choosing that first number to prioritize data protection and security. Man, we all know about the breaches that we hear and see where hackers get in and take data from organizations. You know, when you talk about data protection and security, no one really wants it or we know wants to talk about it, and until it happens to you, right? So it's not typically that exciting for most but of course, if you don't do it, it's challenging to recover from these data and security breaches. So when you're applying things like AI, it's critical to protect data, as well as information, privacy information about the people themselves. And so this is a really critical area around digital ethics also. Alright, number three, focus on data quality. Now this is a constant challenge, right? controlling the ingestion or the input of your data and its quality, all the way through to consumption is a challenge. I was working with one group and the clerks at the retail stores, they were putting pricing information in a wide range of locations, and it made it very difficult for the business people to run their business. Now today, there are some awesome tools that help to clean and scrub your data. But nevertheless, data quality absolutely critical. So that's number three. Number four, reduce duplicate data. Now, as you know, lots of times we'll have multiple systems in our business, and they overlap in terms of their capabilities and what it is they do and that produces multiple copies of similar data might be customer information or address or what have you. And of course, you know, when you think about that you're struggling with Well, which one of these is the source of truth, right? Which one do I want to turn to and say, This is the master, if you will. So while you might have multiple systems from multiple vendors for your business, it helps to think about your data as a flow through the business like a river, right? So it comes in from data ingestion, to Hey, I'm going to curate it and clean it to him, I'm going to reduce, I'm going to actually get rid of this duplication. And finally, get it to a point where you can do analytics and AI and things like that, to help improve your business decision making now, if you have the ability to reduce the actual number of duplicate or similar systems, that helps tremendously with this as well, certainly can take a lot of money off the table for the business also in terms of expenses. All right. Number five, ensure your data is readily accessible to your team. Well, yeah, what can you say, you know, having the right access controls to the data preventing others that shouldn't get into the data is just common sense. Number six, create a data recovery strategy. It reminds me earlier in my career, I've worked with one client who had a significant system crash. And so they went to their backups. And well, yesterday's backup actually had failed, they didn't realize it. So they went back to the day before and the neighbor and then they went a week back and then two weeks back, and then a month back, they went two months back and finally found a backup that was valid that they could use. And so they lost two months of data had to do a lot of obviously re re entry manually back in those days, right? So of course, it's not just about backing up your data. It's about the recovery. So this is called a data recovery strategy, not just data backup, but data recovery, right? You want to constantly go back and re verify, can I get back to this information? Is it in a valid state so that I can continue to serve my customers? All right. And then last one, last but not least, number seven, use a quality analytics and AI platform for insights. And of course, you know, I got to toss that one in there, right? I'm a fan of good analytics and AI to guide decision making. It's augmented intelligence is the way that we look at it the way I look at it. But at the end of the day, you want your data to unlock the insights and the guidance to propel your business. Alright, so let's take a step back. So these seven steps identify certainly some of the things to do and, and it can feel like a lot of work. And while it can be but think about the other side, if you don't do this, what's the impact, right? While it can impact your business growth, it can impact the quality of the decisions that you're making, it might even impact the security of your business and your data can be compromised or stolen or take your business all the way down. So recently, I was talking with an executive at a major bank, and she made an interesting statement. She said, data is our most important asset. And then she stopped and paused and corrected herself. And she said, No, it's our weapon. All right, that's the power of data. So when you're controlling your data, you're really taking control of your business, which is really one of the greatest assets or might I use the term weapons for your business to help it compete and grow. Alright everybody, thanks for joining. And until next time, get control your data and turn it into your best business asset. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.