As business operations occur; a lot of (key and crucial) information is created, collected, processed, disseminated, used, stored, and discarded; including destruction and disposal.
With the dominance of technology in business, the data generated by companies is at an all-time high: Reports suggest we’re easily creating 2,500,000 terabytes of data per day. Data plays an important role in many companies, from providing metrics and activity details; even financial information about business performance; and operational information on its efficiency. But as we move faster, click faster and interact like never before, understanding what this data means and how we can use it to improve our business results in a sustainable way is absolutely critical.
One of the key uses of information in business is to learn more about your customers, which allows you to better meet their needs and consistently improve their experience. Regardless of the size of the company, the customer should be at the center of everything we do. We must be able to understand our customers to engage with them genuinely and successfully; compromise them; to encourage them to engage with us. As we better understand the information related to our customers, what they want to tell us, and what they don’t; we will be able to communicate with them in a better way, to retain them and expand our business with them.
From this understanding of our customers, we can use mechanisms to better interact with them, and even go as far as personalization. Despite having a target audience for your business, this audience is based on an estimate of a large collective rather than a specific individual. The data will give you a deeper insight into your consumer audience and specific consumer groups. When it comes to data, there is one key concept that people tend to forget; analyzing the data requires insight. A number alone will always be just a number without the intervention of insight. How to make that number meaningful? From a marketing perspective, intuition can lead to some amazing creative results, but without data there is very little you can do to drive meaningful business change that will help you create exceptional customer experiences and grow your business successfully and in a sustainable way.
Have you ever noticed that you are looking for new shirts on the internet and then related ads start following you, even though you are browsing other pages that have nothing to do with clothes? This is a great example of how big data is used to automatically display offers you’ve shown interest in in the past, and it works! Many times, we end up buying! Statistics show that targeted marketing offers have much higher engagement and conversion rates than standard marketing efforts, and it’s all enabled by the data associated with your customer.
While data is everywhere, it’s not always easy to identify and extract the right data from your business, and herein lies the challenge. 50% of small businesses report they don’t have a clear data strategy, another 47% cite privacy and policy concerns, 40% believe database queries take too long, while 42% don’t have a Clear ROI. To figure this out, it’s important to understand what data is relevant to you and your business goals.
Certainly, the amount of data that we can obtain is overwhelming, but if we use it correctly; we will have one of the most powerful tools we can use in business.
With this amount of data and information circulating everywhere, the importance of information security in organizations cannot be underestimated. It is critical that businesses take the necessary steps to protect their critical information from data breaches, unauthorized access, and other disruptive threats to the security of business and consumer data. It is necessary to implement an Information Security Management System that assesses your level of risk and identifies threats, but at the same time can implement the appropriate security measures to guarantee the protection of information against access, use, disclosure and unauthorized interruption, modification, or destruction to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Remember, this is not only about your company’s information, but also that of your employees and customers.
It all starts with your customers, your people are the ones who make it possible, with the right leadership and the right execution of the strategy. Time is short, but we can accelerate by applying innovation and agility.
- Is the information of your business, employees, and customers safe?
- Can you guarantee its confidentiality, integrity, and availability?
- Do you have a framework or management system?
- What is your level of risk and exposure?
- Do you know the main threats to information security?
- How are you managing them, so they don’t impact you?
- Do you have adequate security measures? How do you know?
- Does your company have a business continuity plan?
