Many people may ask, what is a database? Why is a database important for my business to grow? What can be stored in a database? What are some examples of databases? A simple answer all of these questions is this: A database is an accessible location to store data in order to utilize your data for the benefit of your company.
If you are like a lot of other small to mid-size businesses who use reporting tools like Tableau, Power BI or Domo, you may wonder why you need a database if you can simply access your data through your visualization tool. While a good visualization tool can help you connect to the various data sources you use in your business, (CRM, Financial System, Spreadsheets, Project Management Software, etc…) you may be losing some of the insights that can be gained from bringing those data sources together to make data-driven decisions within your business.
For a digital marketing company, it is important to be able to look at all of the marketing platforms in the same view. In some instances, they are needing data from 20 or more different platforms. A database would be utilized in transforming, aggregating and joining in baseline metrics to provide a holistic view of marketing efforts.
Perhaps you run your business from spreadsheets and need a central repository to track revenue goals and adjustments. Simple applications can be built to create user inputs for goals to go directly into the database to then be joined with actual revenue. Getting at a near real time view of Revenue to Goals will enable you to quickly shift marketing and sales efforts.
Reporting in the past has been too slow and limited that business leaders have focused on a few key indicators that they can use to drive their business. They get comfortable with those but there is so much more potential to use data holistically within a company. The following scenario is not too far off from conversations that occur between a business leader and an analyst.
By the time the analyst comes back with the answer, the business leader has already moved on with his decisions - using the same trusted metrics he has used in the past. Every time this happens in an organization, the potential for making more informed decisions is lost. If this analyst had a central repository for his data, he could produce the desired report within hours, maybe minutes, not days.
The goal for every company is to be able to predict what will make your business more profitable going forward. This analysis can be provided through Data Science and Machine Learning techniques; however, for machine learning to work, you need to develop a strong foundation for the data. Once that foundation is built and data is cleansed, then the real work begins of making smart, agile and data-driven decisions that will affect the profitability of your company.
Data is the life-blood of your business. Understanding your data will ultimately lead to a greater understanding of your business and will directly impact the bottom line.