From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

How data can provide intelligence to the organization

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

How data can provide intelligence to the organization

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- Call me strange, but I have a relationship with data. To me, data is living. I do realize it's an inanimate object, but I do think it's an intelligent object. Data cannot only provide information like this month's sales, but it can also communicate with software to provide automation. My first experience with data at this level was with a regulated industry. They were required to provide information at different time points, and then they were required to report on all the things they did to meet those times. Mail came into the office, people went to retrieve their mail for the contracts they supported three times a day. They also printed information and scanned it as needed by walking to and from the printer. Let's just look at the data around the printer, and the scanner process alone. Look at the data as a person walks, there is a distance and that distance takes time. And what if they stop and talk? That's more time. Think about the amount of time at the printer, and what if two people walk up at the same time? Now there is a time the person is there, and the time the other person is waiting. When they walk back to the cube, they begin the real work. When a person has everything ready to go, they walk back to get the mail and deliver the mail that's ready to go out. This occurred multiple times over time by different people all the time. Okay, now let us multiply that by 10 people doing the same job all day long and then let's multiply that by 260 business days. Now business intelligence says that today that's X number of hours spent in transit, business analysis says if we put a printer at their desk, we save X. This is just one way data can help support improvements to the process. We often think about data in the form of a field, or columns on a spreadsheet. Just with one key date, we can create other dates to trigger other events. Technology will allow us to create information automatically the very same information that a human would have to figure out and then we can have the human verify the information, save time and be more accurate. The most effective data analyst develop skills and a relationship with data. It's important to start learning to see it as a living thing that can help us refine current processes like walking to a printer and automate processes like creating more data.

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