Great Business Analytics start with Great Data Management

In a world where Big Data and Analytics at many companies are driving the smart business decisions and streamlined business operations, there are many others who are trying to search for ways to make business analytics available to every decision maker in their company for obvious reasons while making their companies agile and voraciously competitive in the marketplace.

For many, for whom the use of the word big data causes confusion, complexity and doubt regarding how this all should get applied in their companies need to move incrementally in a staged manner. I believe, it all has to start with great data management first. There are 4 basic steps any company can follow:

1. Define: Define all the business processes.

2. Standardize: Standardize the business processes across divisions, geographies.

3. Measure: Define and start collecting the metrics that you would like to track

4. Optimize: Use metrics in a disciplined way to improve business processes.

This has to happen before we understand the implication of big data and analytics in our respective companies.

Once people start collecting the metrics and start making the use of these in solving business problems, improve processes - people in the organizations evolve and build capabilities in the company to move to the next step.