While there is no doubt that the future of analytics will include a mobile focus, it is critical that companies take a long look at their existing data and infrastructure before diving right into a mobile venture. By taking a step back, analyzing the current state environment and carefully planning to become a mobile enabled enterprise, companies can then look to deploy solutions that will enable their key stakeholders to make educated business decisions on the go.
Data Quality on the Go
While mobile analytics can be a very useful tool to empower users on the move, the challenge is taking the massive amounts of corporate data that is available, consolidating it, cleansing it and then organizing it in a way that makes sense for business users and mobile devices. There is more information available to companies now than ever before, and exposing this data to business users is only useful if the data is clean, accurate and helps them do their jobs better.
If users spend time trying to decipher complex reports and make sense of inaccurate data, then IT is actually impeding the organization rather than empowering it. Because underlying data is the key to any successful mobile deployment, companies are advised to start any new mobile initiative by first looking at the data source and the quality of the data that will be used. If source data is not cleansed and organized, there is no point in building out a mobile infrastructure. If the first time a user opens a beautifully mobile-enabled dashboard on his or her tablet and the data is inaccurate, the likelihood of that user ever tapping into corporate data from the tablet again is highly unlikely.
Instead they’ll rely on email and other applications while on the go. While this is also true for analytics deployed to a standard computer, the stakes are even greater with mobile analytics, because they are often accessed when face to face with a customer or when the user has no ability to validate the data. This puts increased pressure on IT.
Taking that fact into consideration, a significant amount of time should be spent upfront cleaning the various data sources that will feed the mobile reports. Efforts should be centered on data cleansing, data quality and data governance to avoid the infamous “garbage in, garbage out” problem.
Data Management on the Move
The concept of ensuring data is clean and free of inaccurate or duplicate data has been around for more than 20 years. What started initially as a mailing issue (validating addresses so customers receive your catalog) has evolved into ensuring both structured and unstructured data are accurate and meeting the demands of the business. At the same time, the consumers of an organization’s data have continued to evolve.
Initially, data was primarily used for internal purposes only. Although a customer might call their sales rep to discuss an order, clients often didn’t have direct access to their own data. As this evolved into the presentation of information via the Web, customers began to have more direct interaction with their data. Although clients had access to data, it was still a restricted view of information (such as name and address only) that had limited effects on how business was conducted. From a sales standpoint, the data was still typically behind a firewall and not readily accessible by the sales rep when meeting at a client’s location.
This has continued to evolve, and as we move to the mobile presentation of data, information is available at all times. With this migration to readily accessible data, two key considerations should be examined: What does this mean from a data governance standpoint? And what are the data quality best practices that should be implemented by an organization?
First, for data governance, there are three considerations with mobile analytics:
- What is our company’s policy regarding mobile access to data? What information should be available and what are the roles and responsibilities associated with this access?
- Do we have data definitions and standards in place? A data taxonomy should be defined and disseminated throughout the organization to ensure everyone understands the data and the resulting analytics.
- What are our mobile technology standards? Which devices and operating systems do we plan to make available to our user base (iPhone, iPad, Android Tablets, Blackberry Playbook, etc)?
In parallel to addressing the mobile governance policies, the need to develop a data quality strategy should be considered. From a performance standpoint, duplicate data often causes the biggest performance degradation as multiple versions of the truth exist and could potentially be presented to clients. The following data quality checklist should be examined within your organization:
- What technologies are we leveraging for data quality?
- Is data quality addressed in a batch or real-time fashion within our organization?
- What is our overall strategy for data quality measurement Specifically: What rules do we have in place to determine a duplicate record? If duplicates are found, how should we present this to users in a mobile platform? And how do we ensure we aren’t showing one client’s data to another client?
- Most importantly, do we have our data quality strategy defined to ensure our mobile analytics are correct? If not, our credibility, both with our external and internal customers, is at risk. At the same time, the field sales team, which should use mobile analytics when meeting with clients, may depend on other sources of data to meet their information demands.
