NOVEMBER 2023CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8CXO InsightsIN MY VIEWhite (2019) describes analytics combined with the modern culture of data as an environment of experimentation, empowerment, curiosity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Achieving such an environment requires a shift in how we work. A culture of data framework combines people, process, and technology to bring real value from data to the organization, improving the speed of decision making and decreasing operational costs. The keywords "provide value from data to the organization." To achieve such transformation, all the decision-making employees, from individual contributors serving the customers to process and people leaders, need to "speak" data. While conversant in business models' people, process, and technology capabilities, most executives do not "speak data." Therefore, the first logical question is: What exactly is data?Data is surprising, inspiring, emotive, compelling, and persuasive. Data is power; it finds answers, portrays truth, inspires us to tell stories, motivates us, and opens our eyes. Data highlights patterns, prediction, and outliers, and communicate the big picture, the hidden details. Data will propel us further, it will make us smarter, it can find the cure.Data comes in different shapes, sizes, and forms. It can be structured and unstructured, primary or secondary, qualitative and quantitative. In the last few years, data has moved from the stack to flow, static to dynamic. The amount of structured and unstructured data being generated and stored has exploded recently into exponential progression due to the digitalization of data and connectivity of devices achieved with IoT (Eberendu, 2016). Doctor Olga Kamenchuk Nisbet, Professor at Northwestern University, defines structured data as organized in rows and columns, often serving as the primary source of data collected by the organization. Structured and primary data is generated from customer interactions, product usage, supported internal applications, communication networks, employee interactions, and services produced by the company. Structured data is easy to use and measure. Unstructured data is characterized as text data generated through the tracking of daily transactions, social media posts, sensor-generated digital images, videos, audios, and clickstreams, which encompass contributions from organizations and individuals. There is also secondary data, often collected by others and sold for profit. Organizations purchase these secondary data points to enrich their primary data to learn more about their customers. MARTA MAGNUSZEWSKA, SENIOR DIRECTOR (VP) OF CLAIMS ANALYTICS, MARKEL.THE NEED TO "SPEAK" DATA IN ORGANIZATIONSWMarta Magnuszewska
< Page 7 | Page 9 >