Data is the best unkept secret a company uses to achieve goals victoriously. They can extract and learn so much from it. With the emphasis on Big Data strategies and data-driven organisations in the past few years, we are currently witnessing fast growth in the data industry’s profitability.
Growth in Industry
MicroStrategy’s 2020 Global State of Enterprise Analytics records 60% of global companies as users of data and analytics specifically to drive cost and process efficiency. This number continues to grow as more companies see the value of analytics tools and techniques.
Some of these systems have weaknesses that come to light when companies experience big changes that affect their systems’ capabilities. For example, mergers and acquisitions. This, however, does not stop the industry’s growth. Instead, it is leading to the faster evolution of data analytics solutions. In addition, new hardware and software tools are coming along every day, with upgrades that resolve previous issues. As advantageous as these automated solutions are, however, they cannot produce optimum results without the correct strategy and implementation plan.
Data Management
Data management refers to the end-to-end lifecycle of data in a company. In other words, it refers to “the processes we use to plan, specify, enable, create, acquire, maintain, use, archive, retrieve, control, and purge data,” according to Data Management Association (DAMA). To manage data successfully, you must consider several factors. According to CIO, these factors include:
Data Movement:
Data should flow strategically and intentionally according to your business’s objectives. As more industries adopt hybrid cloud environments (on-premise and remote), it becomes more important to ensure data is secure, yet accessible to relevant stakeholders.
Data Locality:
Strategies for data management should showcase a clear understanding of where the company’s data lives and how it travels through networks. Data locality speaks to this as it helps with eliminating latency and network congestion due to movement through slow networks.
Metadata Management:
The establishment of processes and policies is necessary to allow for data integration and accessibility. We do this through the administration of information that describes all business data, also known as Metadata Management.
Data Catalogues:
Coordinating data is a necessary course f action for the sake of efficiency. We accomplish this through creating and updating clear data catalogues (inventories of data that are organised) to make them easy to find for relevant stakeholders.
Data Pipelines
Certain steps can be taken to optimize the overall movement of data pipelines, such as the filtering of data earlier on in the pipeline, better algorithms, parallelization of data flow.
Policy and Governance:
One must manage data according to a set of standards that safeguard the information and ensure consistency. Similarly, relevant stakeholders should define these governance rules in detail, while also making provisions where necessary. Such a policy can incorporate data ethics and risk management principles.
Intrinsic Security and Trust:
Securing data should always be top-of-mind. Thus, it is necessary to ensure every step in your data management process is secure – from protecting data in transit moving across hybrid cloud solutions to ensuring the safety of physical items you obtain through supply chains.
Data Integration:
Finally, when looking to answer specific questions within your company that require data from multiple sources, data integration makes this possible. This step also supports the analytic processing element of data management as it aligns, combines, and presents all data stores to an end-user.
eCommerce Analytics Tool
In conclusion, businesses should look into software with analytics properties. For example, the Digitrade eCommerce Solution is an effective eCommerce tool for business that is built on Magento 2, which has excellent data analytics abilities. This platform comes with numerous analytics and reporting features, including:
- Integration with Google Analytics
- Admin dashboard for report overview
- Sales report
- Tax report
- Abandoned shopping cart report
- Report of products with the most views
- Report of products with the most purchases
- Low stock report
- Product reviews report
- Tags report
- Coupon usage report
- Invoice total sales
- Refunded total sales