Many reasons exist on why you don’t have the data you want or need for your business.
It’s no secret that data is becoming important. Companies like AT&T and Amazon have a large Big Data business unit where they are trying to find trends in their massive data sets.
Our customers have struggled with this constantly, especially if they are using a system like SharePoint or Smartsheets. By the time a customer has called us, they have usually exhausted every resource within their business and often have hired a standard IT company that did not fix the root cause of their woes.
Here are a few reasons why you might not have the data you want or need for your business.
1. You may not have the data. It’s not there at all in any of your databases or spreadsheets. For example, one of our customers wanted to know what projects everyone was working on. They did not understand why they could not see that level of detail. The reason, they didn’t have tools that were collecting that information. We integrated T-Sheets with SharePoint and now they have that data.
2. Your data might not be clean. Read, 4 Reasons Why Your Data is Not Clean. If you are using a spreadsheet to manage your business’s data, then you will most likely have errors in that data. It could be hard to trust it, too.
3. Data Integration problems. Sometimes the software we use is “closed.” This basically means that the software you are using cannot talk to other software. For example, SharePoint can integrate with virtually every type of software and share data in multiple ways. However, a spreadsheet, like Excel or SmartSheets, can’t talk to other software or share data effectively.
4. Data visualization problems. You might have the data you need, you just cannot see it. You may not have the tools you need to visualize the data… like Tableau and Power BI. See our data visualization story and an example of how this could happen in your business.