The Data Journey

Before you can maximize your data you need to understand the 5 stages of the data journey. Your organization may be at any one of these stages, however you will get the highest impact out of stage 5.

Fessex Consulting can help you understand this journey and enable you to turn your data into actions.

Let’s dive into each one of these stages:

IDENTIFY where your data is and/or comes from

You have data already, whether you know it or not. Moreover, you are collecting data too. Your data may be buried in server logs, or transaction data bases, in your web analytics platform, POS system, etc. It exists in copious amounts, you just need to get it out onto a system where your data can be cataloged and organized.

EXTRACT your data and save it into your data lake

Now that you know where your data is, you need to save it into a data lake. Data lakes enable you to save ALL your data and not have to choose what to save – storage is inexpensive. It will help you accelerate answering questions. You can use a variety of technologies and formats to store your data. The most important part of a data lake is creating a catalog. You need to know what is in there.

ORGANIZE needed data into a cleansed layer easy to manipulate

Your data in the data lake is in raw format; extract only what you need – you want to store everything because you do not know what you will need when – onto a separate database where you can run queries and start to answer questions:

How many active users do you have?
How much revenue have we had in the last 24 hours (week, month, etc.)
Where do my consumers spend more time?
What marketing channels are more profitable
What products sell more?

VISUALIZE your data by creating dashboard and reports

You are going to want to automate answering the questions above and many others. In other words, you want those questions to be answered continuously. The best way to do just that is to deploy using best-in-class visualizations tools and visualize your answers in the form of dashboards. Ultimately, you want your entire organization to have access to most of the answers; it will enable you to operate more efficiently.

CREATE hypothesis and run experiments

Now that you have your data, data lake, your cleansed layer and your dashboards, it is time to turn your data into action.
We do that by:

Exploring your data and running analysis on it.
Developing hypotheses and validating them with you and the data
We design experiments and execute them to prove or disprove your hypothesis
Results of the experiments are displayed in the dashboards where they are analyzed
Based on the results we rework the hypothesis and run the experiment again.
We keep on repeating this process

There are few elements to note:

If the hypothesis is proven correct, then you expand the experiment. The initial experiment will be small and low budgeted. You increase the size and budget as it continues to prove correct
If the hypothesis is proven incorrect, then the experiment was also successful because now you know what “not to do”. Also, you need to revise your hypothesis and try again
Hypotheses are created and based on data science and machine learning models that predict future behaviors such as churn, conversion, LTV, product affinity, etc.

FESSEX Consulting can help you move to a more effective methodology to manage and use your data to generate actionable insights and dramatically improve your operations.