Discover the Main Sources of Company Data
Any mid-sized or large company will have databases where they store all of their useful information about customers, their transactions, and operations.
If you work for a local business owner—a florist, for example—and they don’t have digital data, business intelligence is going to be much harder to do. 😄
An overview of the main sources of data:
Category | Data source | Example data types |
Human Resources | HRIS (Human Resource Information Systems):
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Finance | ERP (Entreprise Resource Planning):
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Customer | CRM (Customer Relationship Management):
| Customer details:
Commercial relationship history:
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Operational Data | Operational database Various specialized software packages for particular business sectors or software solutions developed by the business itself. |
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It’s important to be aware that a whole host of data external to the company will probably also be useful to you in your projects, and the good news is that this is often really easy to access.
For example:
If you work in finance for a multinational company, you’ll need to know the exchange rate for financial transactions between several currencies to calculate financial performance in a single currency (dollars, euros, etc.). You can get this data online:
By downloading it (from Yahoo Finance, for instance) and manually importing it, or via an internal company website such as SharePoint.
By automatically querying online data feeds.
You can find other useful external data on the data portals or on the US government open data portal.
Create New Data
What do I do if I don't have any data for my project?
Let’s take an example:
Your company is in crisis. As a result of constant pressure and poor working conditions, your best talent is resigning en masse, and other employees are burned out. You are appointed HR project manager in charge of quality of working life (QWL). Your mission is to improve workplace conditions, thereby improving work/life balance.
How will you gather useful data to assess the current situation and measure the effectiveness of your action plan?
You won’t find any data within your information systems on how employees view their working conditions.
Luckily, you can create your own data by running a survey, for example. You could send out a questionnaire every quarter using Microsoft Forms if you have an Office 365 license.
Be creative! Any information can be gathered, directly or indirectly, and transformed into digital data for your analysis and reporting needs.
Just one bit of advice for situations like this: plan ahead for what you intend to analyze!
If you’re running a survey, your analysis options won’t be the same for:
A rating on a scale of 1 to 10 (without room for comment).
An open question with a blank box to fill with free text.
Or a multiple-choice question with set responses, etc.
Take time to consider:
The information you want to gather.
The format required to be able to use it.
This will save you time at the analysis stage.
Over to You!
You’re a consultant working on a project for the Teleperformance call center. This company carries out commercial prospecting over the phone, calling private individuals on their cell phones to make them various offers, such as changing their electricity provider or car insurer. You know the kind – those calls you get all the time from numbers you don’t recognize! 😄
Your client (the call center) is currently dealing with a serious lack of resources due to a high rate of absenteeism among its teams. Your task is to find out what is causing this and to put forward a plan of action.
In this scenario, what do you think would be useful sources of data for understanding the high rate of absenteeism among employees and why?
HR data
Financial data
Customer data
Inventory data
Operational data
Take a few minutes to think about it before looking at the answer below!
Ready? Okay, then.
Well, actually, it was a trick question! (😈 Mwahahaha!)
Answer 1: HR Data
It’s no surprise that to analyze the cause of absenteeism you’re going to need data relating to absenteeism! That is to say, a history of employee absences from the call center in order to gather statistics, such as identifying periods of the year where absenteeism is higher.
Answer 5: Operational Data
It’s highly likely that operational data will also be useful:
Work schedules.
The volume of calls expected per day from each agent.
These are good indicators of employee workloads.
It’s possible that increased workload has led to a deterioration in working conditions, which is leading to such high rates of absenteeism.
But what about the other data?
Let’s take financial data, for example.
In our case, it’s pretty unlikely that financial data (turnover, operational costs, etc.) are directly linked to operator absenteeism.
However, imagine a scenario in which the call center uses temporary labor but has reduced the volume of this temporary labor in recent months. Through the operating expenses, you could perhaps observe a correlation.
Or imagine that your field investigation has revealed that the departments where a commission is paid for each contract sold are facing half the amount of absenteeism. Now that’s an interesting observation for your action plan, isn’t it?
Let’s Recap!
In medium or large-sized companies, data is available in databases.
It’s possible to use external online data for your analysis needs.
When you have no data, gather new data yourself, through surveys, for example.
Combine data from different sources to come up with new lines of analysis.
In the next chapter we’ll see how to protect sensitive data belonging to your company and your users.
