When it comes to business, data truly matters. You need to keep track of your inventory and a long list of expenses to know whether your business is making money or not. All businesses need to manage their data well or else you end up making wrong decisions that will not benefit the company over time. It requires you to keep track of all of the company’s practices, policies, and procedures efficiently and effectively. Times are changing and trends come and go. If you are an entrepreneur, you won’t be able to tell whether you need to make changes in the company if you have no data to back it up.
Moreover, almost all businesses today use technology in running their affairs. Even traditional and family-owned enterprises like South Houston’s Air Check Mechanical Service, a local HVAC company, has some sort of technology in place. Businesses want data badly especially when it pertains to customers. Even if you don’t actively seek out customers yourselves, it can prove helpful in social media. Connecting with the right people will not only help promote your business but grow it too.
The secret to better data and analytics outcomes, he said, is “data socialization.” This new approach integrates traditional self-service data preparation benefits with key attributes common to social media platforms, enabling data scientists, business analysts, and even novice business users to search for, share, and reuse prepared, managed data to achieve true enterprise collaboration and agility.
The biggest change in the analytics space over the past 20 years, is that nobody knows what anyone else has done, and there is little resusability of datasets leading to wasted time and duplicated efforts.
Citing data from IBM, Pilkington said that the annual cost of poor data quality in the U.S. is $3.1 trillion and analysts waste 50{608719487aea66ab93e94ded29b5a9b0f35497743f0d9dfdc324fd02be02e541} of their time finding and correcting data, resulting in lost time and lost opportunities.
According to Pilkington, there are too many autonomous, one-off projects; too many compliance requirements; it takes too long to get, clean and organize the data; organizations lack operational repeatability; and there is an overall lack of trust in the data.
Almost everyone access the web right now every single day. The use of social media has skyrocketed with the help of smartphones and mobile applications. Socializing data can help entrepreneurs make the most of the data they have collected to ensure they remain accessible all the time but safe from cybercriminals that abound the web.
However with these changes comes a huge risk of cyber crime. Technological advancements meant for easy accessibility, convenience and improved service delivery brings with it loopholes that criminals always try to exploit.
Cyber crime contributes to annual revenue loss through business interruptions and most cyber attacks are mainly for financial gain; people steal confidential information such as trade secrets and clients data and use it to their benefit.
Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC in their annual survey results cited cyber attacks as the top emerging risks the largest threat for businesses in 2015. Cyber security is a major issue and companies should treat cyber risk management as a high priority area.
Data mining is way more complex than just collecting information from clients, the big question should be how is this going to benefit our customers, the organisation and are we creating platforms which are user friendly and secure? Every business using computer networks is at risk and can be a victim to cybercrime, a fact which cannot be ignored. With the ever increasing risk and costs associated with cyber attacks, it’s important that businesses adopt and implement an internal risk management unit and cyber insurance to help manage the risks.
(Via: http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?aid=68880&dir=2017/may/17)
If there is a major drawback to advances in technology, it is the proliferation of cybercriminals who are out to get your data and money when you are most vulnerable. You can use antivirus or firewalls to protect yourselves from them but like the technology we are using, their criminal methods also improve and get better with time. You have a lot to lose as an entrepreneur because it is not just personal files we are talking about but lots and lots of data that you use as you run your business in your day-to-day.
An important thing you need to keep in mind aside from using protective measures like antivirus is to update your operating system so you can also benefit from the updates and fixes on bugs you used to complain about all the time. Most of all, your computer’s hard drive should always be in great shape and you have a backup in place considering it contains all your important data that you can’t always replicate that easily. And most importantly, make sure you have someone you can count on when it comes to tech issues in your line of business because many things are changing quickly and you need to be able to react fast if you want to stay relevant in this increasingly changing and competitive world.
