Another year ended earlier this month, and a new one has begun. The start of the new year was not only a time for celebration and reflection, but also for self-analysis. That applies to your business or nonprofit as well. Has your organization crunched the numbers on all the data you accumulated over 2017? If so, is your organization more “self-aware” because of it? Did all that data turn into valuable information that will inform your decisions in 2018? Was it clean data — that is, free of errors?
If you answered yes to those questions, bravo! Your organization will surely benefit from it… especially if 2017 found you going down the wrong path and in need of an informed correction.
If you answered no, you have a problem.
It all begins with dirty data. Especially if you are going to be combining data from multiple sources to perform analysis, it’s imperative that you clean up all of the errors caused by human error and other reasons.
Errors can include:
- Spelling errors
- Transposition of numbers
- Inconsistent terminology
- Incomplete data sets that need to be “enriched” with more data to become more useful
If you’ve got a lot of data, it’s going to take you a while to clean all of it up. It’s a worthwhile project. Once it’s clean, you can confidently put the data from multiple sources into a “warehouse” of sorts that possesses enhanced intelligence and reporting capabilities.
With clean data, your reports will be much more accurate and informative. With a CRM system, like Salesforce in place, you can download powerful reports that put all of that data into any perspective your organization chooses.
If you’ve got messy data on your hands, you should give us a call. We’ve seen some very messy data indeed, and helped our clients with industrial-strength cleaning! After that, we helped them develop exactly the reports their managers need on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis.
Remember, dirty data means inaccurate information to act upon. If that’s the case, what’s the good of all that data you’ve been collecting?