Many businesses have made great strides in the collection and utilization of their own data. Few, however, have taken advantage of the full potential of combining internal data with data provided by third parties, vendors, or public data sources. As a result, it’s a mistake to overlook such external data.
A competitive advantage can be gained by companies that stay on top of the ever-expanding external-data ecosystem and successfully integrate a wide range of external data into their operations.
The COVID-19 crisis serves as a good example of how useful external data can be. Because of the dramatic shift in consumer purchasing habits and digital behavior over the last few months, previous consumer research and forecasting models are no longer relevant.
Organizations’ internal data, on the other hand, yielded little insight into these shifting patterns. When it comes to planning and responding, organizations have access to a wealth of external data.
Even though external data sources have enormous potential, they also pose a number of practical difficulties. To begin, it takes enormous effort to gain a basic understanding of what is obtainable, given the segmented external-data environment and its rapid expansion.
Third-party data from external sources, when combined with data from internal sources, can improve advanced analysis, help optimize business processes (via geolocation, weather, or traffic data, for example), reduce the amount of time spent on maintaining internal data, and enable the development of new services.
It is possible to acquire thousands of different data products through a wide variety of channels, such as data brokers, data aggregators, and analytics platforms, and the number of available products is growing every day. It can also be challenging to conduct an analysis of the quality and economic value of data products.
In addition, the effective utilization and operationalization of external data may necessitate making adjustments to the organization’s current data environment. These adjustments may include modifications to the organization’s systems and infrastructure. When companies use certain kinds of external data, they need to remember to keep privacy concerns and customer scrutiny in the forefront of their minds at all times.
Third-party data doesn’t stay the same because it’s not static. Every online search, decision to buy, or investment ends up creating more data. The problem is to identify the right collection of knowledge and use the right trillions of data points to discover fresh insights that will help your organization reduce risk and make better business decisions.
When trying to get more out of external data, organizations face completely different problems than when trying to get the most out of their own data. Even though working with internal data can be hard, business leaders know how to handle it.
Integration of external data is a lot more complex than that. There is a lot of data available, and most of it is scattered, non – structured, and doesn’t have conventional ideas. That means businesses have to help fix the scale problem and figure out how to incorporate external data before they can get the value out of it, which requires specialized knowledge and skills.
To get started, organizations should set up a team whose sole job is to find data sources. In our experience, a dedicated data scout or strategist is an important part of this team. This person works with the data analytics team and business functions to find business operations, cost, and economic expansion improvements that could be driven by external data.
Internet research may seem like a simple way for bandwidth teams to find individual data sets, but it may not be the best way. It usually leads to a lot of time-consuming tasks and negotiations with each vendor.
To get a better value for money from external data, you need to plan ahead, have a flexible database schema, and keep evaluating for quality.
Backing up your data is an important step that is often missed before relocating on to the actual data integration. Your apps may already have a reason to back up your data, so check with the company that makes them make sure. You can back it up in the cloud or on a hard drive. If you want to be extra cautious, you need both.
It is important to have the right integration software for your needs. It automates a large part of your data organizational processes and immediately syncs data here between application fields in your software stack. This makes it much less necessary to enter data by hand, standardizes data formats, and reduces the chance of making a mistake.
The last part of this step is making sure that the quality of the data used is always good by keeping an eye on it all the time. This means looking at the intent of data regularly against the quality framework that has been set up to see if the source data have changed and to figure out what caused any changes (for example, schema updates, expansion of data products, changes in underlying data sources).
Data leaders must analyze the source and layout, map roles and responsibilities, and create a dataset for a data scientist to look over. The dataset is then cleaned up, which can take from a few days to a few weeks. If the project includes data from the past, data engineers have to think about how the format has changed over time. Before intent data or external data is put into production, security issues need to be dealt with. In short, putting external data to good use and getting value from it requires time and money.
With the right person, an external data-as-a-service relationship can help organizations quickly answer business questions by combining internal and external data. If a company’s leaders are thinking about forming a partnership, they should look for providers with a wide range of sources and sets of data to solve the supply problem and a lot of knowledge and resources to fix the speed problem. To select the best intent data vendors read our blog how to select best intent data sources
Can external data be incorporated into internal operations to streamline business processes? Let’s discuss External Data Integration – NOW!