Intelligence is now more important in business and investment than ever before. Getting the right information at the right time can make or break a company or a hedge fund. Thus, companies invest a lot in data analysis in order to get business insights on time to benefit from them.
This data-driven approach has been proven successful for many years now. However, extracting crucial insights might appear challenging sometimes. Thus, here is a short explanation of why and how to do it and 5 tips for better insight extraction results.
What exactly are insights and why do they matter?
Let us begin at the beginning. What exactly is meant by insights? One hears a lot of talk about data these days and for centuries everyone knew the value of information in business. However, one can sense that insight is something different from both data and information even if being unsure how precisely they are to be distinguished.
Firstly, we can distinguish data and information by saying that information is data put into context. Data is just raw facts, that describe very specific features of reality. Data becomes information when we start to analyze it and put some meaning into it. For example, raw data on the company’s revenue over the past few years are just numbers. But once we apply basic statistical analysis to it, it can become information on whether the company is growing or not.
Insights can be described in very different ways. For businesses, however, the most important thing about insights is that they provide actionable opportunities. Insights are revealed by further analyzing the data and comparing various pieces of information. Thus, through further researching the company in question and its industry we can have insights into its true value or future potential.
This also explains why insights are so important in business. They are data and information in action. Applying data analysis to extract insights tells us a lot about what we can or should do and helps us build our long-term business strategy.
Five tips for getting insights
There are many ways to arrive at valuable investment and business insights. However, as you may have guessed, the very beginning of all these ways has to do something with data. Thus, it is always advisable to implement a data-driven mindset in your company or financial fund in order to better understand where the insights come from and how they are to be used. Then one can follow these 5 tips for best results.
- Always prioritize data quality. There is no way to get valuable insights from outdated or mostly incorrect data. And data structuring issues might significantly delay the process of insight extraction. Even up to a point when it is too late to use the insights. Thus, always try to get the best quality data in the market, whether you collect it yourself or acquire it from a third party.
- Constantly enrich your data. Even when you have high-quality data more often than not there will be room for improvement. Data enrichment is the process through which your data sets can be made better and more informative by adding data points from a reliable outside source. This ensures that the extracted insights are relevant and deep cutting.
- Utilize state-of-the-art analysis tools. There are plenty of data management and analysis tools to choose from. These software solutions can help you organize your data and analyze it efficiently. Using such tools also leads to cost-effectiveness and can improve the quality of the end product. This is due to the fact that humans are more prone to making errors that AI-based analysis tools.
- Think about how the insights are to be reported. Publishing is also a crucial part of insights extraction. Thus, always consider the people who will be reading the reports and how best to present the insight to them. Here you can also rely on AI tools that can help you with visualization and display of the most important findings.
- Consider purchasing insights on demand. Data on demand has been around for quite some time now. However, now there is a growing industry of insights on demand, enabled by cloud computing networks. This concept means accessing everything you need for insight extraction from the data to analysis tools on demand through the cloud. Consider this option when you need quick insights into a new object of interest. Additionally, this is a great opportunity for companies that do not have in-house data collection and analysis resources.
There you have it. Following these simple practices will help you get the best business insights for your future planning and investment decision-making. Naturally, there are more tips and steps to be taken when extracting insights for particular purposes in specific cases. However, these practices are applicable in nearly all cases, thus be sure to consider them when trying to get actionable business insights.
Wrapping up
To sum up, a data-driven approach is crucial in every industry today. However, data is just the beginning of the journey through information and towards insights.
Another thing to remember when looking for insights is that you should know what questions you are aiming to answer. The best kind of insights are insights into what sort of action we should be taking. When you know the clearly defined questions you need to answer before acting, you will have a much better chance of getting that kind of insight.
