Giving Structure to Data

Any large company generates a significant amount of raw data every day. Even small businesses and local shops create huge masses of raw data through their daily sales, purchases, emails and other transactions.Unfortunately, this data is often discarded or ignored because businesses do not understand the benefits of leveraging this data, or do not have the capabilities to leverage this data for their benefit. The reality is that this data that seems meaningless actually holds considerable insight into customer trends and various efficiencies which a business could leverage for their benefit it they were able to harness and understand the data that is created every day. Unfortunately, even for those businesses which understand that the data that is created every day is useful, the process of gathering, formatting and understanding the data is extremely difficult. Because of this, highly valuable data is wasted and lost every day. The process of cleaning and formatting data into anything usable would take a business owner a very long time to do as most business owners do not have the knowledge, skills or technology required to change what looks like meaningless rows of data into something that can be used and studied to better understand their customers and their business. Fortunately, there are companies that specialize in the cleaning, formatting, analyzing and reworking data into something useful. For small business owners, these companies can provide a great service that can lead to new insights into customer trends, employee performance and much more. 

What These Companies Do

The technical term for the service these companies provide is data preparation. This involves cleaning and structuring data in such a way that decision makers in a business can read the information, gain knowledge from it and put that knowledge into use. The organizations that perform this work vary considerably in their specialties and how involved they are in the process. For example, there are companies that specialize in particular types of data. One common specialization is healthcare data as it is unique from most other forms of business as well as the fact that it is more sensitive than most other businesses' data. If the data being cleaned is that of patient medical records or hospital visits, this would be protected by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and would require various considerations by both the healthcare organization as well as the data service company. Another way these companies will often differ from each other is the extent the company is involved in the process. There are some companies that will perform the data cleaning service themselves for he business. In this situation, the business grants the company access to their data and data specialists from the service company perform the cleaning and structuring. While this often allows the small business owner and employees to focus on other tasks, it can lead to confusion and inefficiency as the business owner is not involved in the entire process and often has to ask questions about where certain figures came from. An alternative to this that many companies have been engaging in is to sell a software which allows a business owner to perform data cleaning and formatting themselves. While there is generally a learning curve that comes with this, it can be beneficial for the business owner of employees to be involved in the entire process as they will know where there information is coming from. 

The Right Way For You

Due to the variability in data cleaning companies, business owners are often left wondering which company and what level of involvement is right for them. The reality is that the answer is dependent on what type of business the business owner is involved in and how involved they want to be in the process. Some owners prefer a high level of involvement while others prefer to be hands off until the final product is ready for them to see. 

While finding the right company to clean your data is difficult, the end result is extremely rewarding and leads to significant insight into your business.