Data – The Era of Information

What is data really?

Is it the information that says something to us?

Is it used to make calculated decisions?

Is data everywhere?

 

The answers for above questions is yes.

Data is the collection of facts, numbers, words, measurements, observations and anything that could be translated in a form that a machine can understand it. To be more on technical side, the software is divided into two major categories programs and data. Programs are the made up instructions given to the machines that can be used to manipulate data.

Whichever industry you work in, or whatever your interests are, you would have certainly come across a story about how ‘data’ is changing the face of our world. It could help in many ways such as helpful in the study to cure a dangerous disease, boost the company’s revenue, make a building more efficient or be responsible for those targeted ads as you keep seeing.

In general data is simply another word for information. But in computing and business world, data refers to the information that is machine-readable as opposed to human-readable. Machine-readable data is a structured data compared to human-readable data. Data can be automatically read and processed by the computer programs, if it is in the form of CSV, JSON, XML, XLSX etc.

There are different types of data which are tend to get the most attention in today’s world. They are:-

Personal Data

Personal data is anything that is specific to you. It covers your demographics, your location, your email address and other things that identifies you. Lot of companies collect your personal data, anytime you have to put in your email or credit card details. You are giving away your personal data in these cases. Often they’ll provide you with personalized suggestions to keep you engaged. For example Facebook uses your personal information to suggest content you might like to see, based on what other people similar to you likes.

 

Web Data

Web data is a collective term which refers to any type of data you might pull from the internet, whether to study for research purposes or otherwise. That might be the data on what your competitors are selling, published government data, player performance if football etc. Web data is important because it’s one of the major ways businesses can access information that isn’t generated by themselves. When creating quality business models and making important business decision, businesses need information from both internally and externally to understand what is happening in their organization and what is happening in the market.

 

Transactional Data

Transactional data is anything that requires an action to collect. You might click on an ad, make a purchase, visit a certain web page, etc. Almost every website you visit collects the data of some kind, either through Google Analytics or another 3^rd party system. For example, In the start Netflix might also have used the data of your payment, they collect data from your payment and analyze that which type of people are willing to pay, to shorten their target audience.

 

Sensor Data

Sensor data is produced by objects and is often referred as the IOT(Internet of Things). It covers everything from your smartwatch measuring your heart rate to a building with external sensors that measure the weather. If we talk about self-driving cars, it collects the data in Peta-byte or Exa-byte. It collects the data from the lidar, various sensors etc. If you want to know about LiDAR checkout my last post, link given below.

Reasons why data is important?

Improves People’s Life

Data will help you to improve quality of life for people you support: Improving quality is first and foremost among the reasons why organizations should be using data. By allowing you to measure and take action, an effective data system can enable your organization to improve the quality of people’s lives.

Make Informed Decisions

Data = Knowledge. Good data provides undeniable evidence, while unreliable evidence, assumptions, or abstract observation might lead to wasted resources due to taking action based on an incorrect conclusion.

Get the results you want

Data allows organization to measure the effectiveness of a given strategy: When strategies are put into place to overcome a challenge, collecting data will allow you to determine how well your solution is performing, and whether or not your approach needs to be changed over the long-term.

Find Solutions to the problems

Data allows organization to more effectively determine the cause of problems. Data allows organization to visualize relationships between what is happening in different locations, department and systems.

Back-up Your Arguments

Data is key component to systems approval. Utilizing data will help present a strong argument for system change. Illustrating your argument through the use of data will allow you to demonstrate why changes are needed.

Saves you time

Having smart data collection system in place will save you a valuable amount of time down the road. So many resources are wasted going back again and again to retrieve the same information.

Gets you funding

Funding is increasingly a matter of proving achieved outcomes. Due to the fact that much of funding is data-driven, it is critical that organizations are able to establish evidence-based practices and develop coherent systems that collect and analyze the data.

 

Conclusion

The data is required in order to achieve great success in this digital age. It is the most essential thing now. The data is everywhere. By using the data you make a handful of money and can achieve a high level of decision making. Data is everything or we can say everything we do or did create data.