Where is data?

“In God we trust, all others bring data”, said Dr W. Edwards Deming. Unlike in Star Trek, we do not have transponder by which we can identify Data and beam it.

Organizations have data scattered around different systems. Transactions data such as order, requisition, payments, work activity & deliveries can be in multiple ERPs and its different instances. Master data such as material, customers, suppliers & employees may reside in one system but they have other vices such as duplicities, obsolescence and multi hierarchy. Then there are conversions such as currency & unit of measure and other mapping data between parameters which are required for consolidated analytics. These conversion files are typically available in separate spreadsheets in a share drive.

‘Data is the new oil’. But some individuals have taken this too seriously and have become territorial about it. So getting access and setting up responsibility for regular update becomes challenging.

The best practice is to use advance business analytics tool which can easily connect to a plethora of data sources. Automated and secured gateways can minimize human dependency. Working with service providers with domain expertise and strong technology background would quicken deployment time and value realization.

Cleansing, combining & transforming data coming from multiple sources along with ability to handle huge volume of data is logical next step. Watch out this space for more.