15 Feb Why Your Data Management Partner Must Be A Domain Expert
Every day we generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Data is so valuable that McKinsey Global Institute’s study shows that a company driven by data is 19 times more profitable than other companies.
No wonder data is called the new oil. However, not all data is usable. A study reveals that over 55% of data collected goes unused due to various reasons such as incomplete or missing data.
If a company wants to drive profitability by using data and retain more customers, they need to use good quality data. A PwC survey revealed that 75% of 599 companies had suffered losses due to poor data quality. Sometimes there are duplications or other inconsistencies that could impact the quality of data. That’s why data cleansing is so important. Data cleansing eliminates all the anomalies from the data collected. It brings consistency and makes it usable so that technologies such as Data Analytics, AI, and Machine Learning can optimize its value.
Data cleansing is a very specialized skill, and it needs to be what is the role of the domain expertise and the kind of data used to drive business decisions. Hiring and training an in-house team could be both costly as well as resource-intensive.
That’s where a data partner who is also a domain expert can help the company.
Data management partners with domain expertise can provide clean data for analytics and machine learning
Often companies and data scientists blame the tools for maintaining poor data quality. Although tools play a role in maintaining the quality of the data, what matters more is how it is cleansed and validated. After all, data comes in raw format, and not every data source is good. A typical data cleansing process involves:
- Auditing the data for errors and inconsistencies and detecting data quality problem
- Detecting and eliminating anomalies to harmonize and standardize the data
- Verifying the data for correctness
- Executing the transformation process to replace dirty data with cleaned data
- Recording the transformation process in detail to support data
Domain expertise makes a significant difference as it then allows data partners to understand the process better and apply domain-specific quality rules to verify the data.
Although the process seems doable on paper, it can be a daunting task considering the enormous amount of data that companies collect regularly.
Data management partners with domain expertise can improve the data cleansing process and report subtle, unnoticed insights
Sometimes data cleansing might not be as straightforward as it is for marketing or sales.
Let’s look at the healthcare sector, for instance. Before cleansing the data, the data management partner must know how the data is captured. If the data is captured from a faulty machine, the partner with domain expertise will immediately know that it is unlikely to yield accurate results. Similarly, while cleansing the data, they need to determine if there could be any correlation between the clinical variables and the outcome. They can identify this correlation only if they understand the subject well. A general data partner with no healthcare background might present all the data they find to the hospital. Some of that data would already be known to the hospital, and they might not derive any valuable insights from it. However, someone with domain expert roles and responsibilities will be able to precisely identify which data is important and report it to the hospital. They will also be able to extract important insights from trivial data that could help hospitals make actionable decisions, which may have been impossible otherwise.
The main thing that differentiates a good company from a mediocre one is how they use their data to drive business. However, being data-driven is not enough. The quality of data also matters. So, companies have to be careful from the beginning itself – which is the data cleansing stage. Any error at this stage could percolate throughout the process and lead to disastrous outcomes for the business. Hence, it’s important to choose a master data management services partner who is also a domain expert. Someone with domain expertise will think beyond science, maths, and statistics, and look at the data objectively as an expert to maximize its value.
At Grihasoft, we have domain-specific data experts who have helped companies in Healthcare, Life Sciences, Retail, Manufacturing, Power, Oil & Gas, and Engineering sectors with end-to-end data management services and solutions.
