How To Make Business Critical Data Accessible And Actionable

Business-critical data may do more harm than good if it has duplicate entries, or is stored in paper documents and/or files. You need to digitize it and ensure that the duplicate data is taken care of before you can use it to make well-informed decisions.

Data is of great use to your business, no doubt. You can draw accurate and objective inferences out of it, gain insights that could lay the foundation for stronger customer relationships, and more importantly, make better decisions. Easier said than done. You may not always be able to effectively use data to your advantage. And believe it or not but 67% of the time this could happen due to the lack of quality. For instance, the data that you have at your disposal could very much be duplicate. Worse still, if all of your data or even most of it is in a stack of files, it’s next to impossible for you to search, access, and retrieve the information that you may need to make an important decision.
Well, there’s a way out. Say, your data is duplicate. What you can do here is to look for data duplication solutions, but the question is why data duplication is important for your business in the first place? For starters, duplicate data is eating up your storage space. And secondly, if and when put to use, it can adversely affect your analysis, more often than not, leading to wrong decisions. So, it’s imperative for you to deduplicate. On that note, here’s how you can about it:

• Start off by merging related data
• Next up, use multiple criteria to identify the duplicates
• Finally, purge the duplicate information so as to get access to a clean database, one that you can easily access and act upon

Of course, if it seems a little too much to handle, you can always outsource data duplication services or reach out to an expert who is adept at undertaking the data duplication process and can go on to deduplicate large volumes of data.
In another scenario, if there are stacks of files all around, you may have a hard time accessing it, let alone use it for analysis. As such less than 0.5 of available data is being analyzed, so imagine having to scour through files for whatever little data you can get your hands on. It’s high time you get your files digitized. That’s because files are not easy to scan through, and what you need is handy, easily-retrievable data, something that digitization can help you with. That said, the process of digitization can be applied to just about any document, be it a newspaper, a corporate record, or an insurance form. And guess what, you could get a document converted in the format of your choice.
Wondering what is document digitization, and what all does it entail? Herein lies the answer:

• It’s a process that can help you do away with heaps of paper records, which could otherwise be quite costly to store and maintain.
• Usually, the process involves the collection of documents, getting rid of the binding materials, if any, and then using scanners to save the documents in an image format.
• And once you have the images with you, you can then convert them into text files.

But then, conversion to text would require you to know your way around OCR and ICR methods, and is, therefore, better left to professionals. The best part is that if you find a reliable company for document digitization services, you can even get them to index the files for you, making it rather easy to fetch the necessary information.
Last but not least, you could also benefit from what is commonly referred to as data processing services. Whether you are looking forward to extracting information from structured or customized forms or have been meaning to compile an exhaustive mailing list, these services could do you some real good.