For many enterprise businesses, understanding the importance of gathering and analyzing data is a challenge. For enterprise organizations that have been around for decades, this may be especially true: both the culture and the technology have vastly changed, even in the past five years.
Many organizations are still struggling to absorb the costs of emergency upgrades to legacy software, let alone taking data points into account. For many, the amount of data now available can in itself be intimidating. However, as technology drives more sales online and more services into the cloud, the importance of harnessing analytics to drive business decisions is becoming paramount.
“Data-driven enterprises base their strategic decisions on data,” said Rahul Pathak, general manager for analytics at Amazon Web Services. “This requires thinking about data as an asset, figuring out how to gather it from across the enterprise, bringing it together, and analyzing and using it to inform decision-making.”
Amazon’s use of data has made it the leading provider of goods, music and film that it is today. Data informs their predictions on how fast they can get your purchases to your door. In their web services division, data has helped them to develop the more than 175 services for enterprise businesses. Their use of data is almost unparalleled, but smaller enterprise businesses don’t have to emulate their entire business model. Even implementing a small amount of data gathering within your organization can make a big difference. What time of day are your customers most likely to buy? What times of year are you busiest that you may need to plan for more customer service support? Even if you already know this information anecdotally, looking at the data can help hone in on specific market trends you may not have been aware of.
The first step to collecting more data starts with a data storage system that is reliable, durable and low-cost. The second step is to add in security and policies that protect user information while allowing your analysts access to the data you need.
Ready to learn more about how best to access data and streamline your business systems? Contact Mobile Goods today for more information.