There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace: not only is there more data, but there are more scattered data sources. But to make data usable, we need to consider how the data are presented to end-users and how quickly users can answer their questions. The value of understanding data is critical for businesses to make data-driven decisions and better business performance (in terms of profitability, productivity, efficiency, customer satisfaction). Here effective data modeling can help businesses quickly get answers to very difficult questions.
What is Data Modeling?
Data modeling is nothing but a process of discovering, analyzing, representing, and communicating data requirements in a precise form. Data models depict and enable an organization to understand its data assets.
Improved data modeling leads to greater business benefits. Key success factors for this include linking to organizational needs and objectives, using tools to speed up the steps in readying data for answers to all queries, while prioritizing simplicity and common sense. Once these conditions are met, every business, whether small, medium, or big, can expect data modeling to bring significant business value.
The data modeling workflow progresses from business requirements to the physical implementation of the database. From a high level, data modeling is a process that:
a) Gather business requirements (analyze the data, identify data relationships)
b) Create various data models (conceptual, logical, physical)
c) Supports application development (create application specifications, develop, or integrate applications, deploy applications)
There are challenges, however, beginning with ensuring data quality.
Data Modeling Challenges
1) Eliminating data silos.
2) Cleaning and organizing data sets to remove duplicate information and correct inaccuracies.
3) Integration of data into a single hub for comprehensive analysis
4) Working with traditional IT infrastructure and processes
To make correct decisions, businesses need to make the data work for them. Taking the time to more effectively use the data to make decisions is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have.
Data Modeling for Business Insights
Today businesses are looking at data models as the foundation, to solve their business challenges, bolstering a need for BI and analytics within the organization. At the foundation of every BI & Analytics team, building business-driven data models are at their core. These models help create key database frameworks for business and technical team collaboration, which in turn help build effective reporting & meaningful analytical insights to drive better decision making.
The proper utilization of data should not be, nor is it, exclusive to the top players. Business intelligence (BI) tools have given companies of all sizes access to powerful data modeling capabilities. Businesses can transform data into actionable insights with BI tools like:
- Excel Dashboards
- Tableau
- Power BI
However, the entire process of data modeling is not as easy as it seems. A data model for one line of business is hardly appropriate for another line of business. Using data models to drive your key business decisions efficiently, you must have a clear understanding of your organization’s requirements and organize your data properly using individual tables for facts and dimensions to enable quick analysis and keep the models updated overtime.
Benefits of Data Modeling
1) A data model ensures that all data objects required by the database are accurately represented
2) It provides a clear picture of the base data and can be used by database developers to create a physical database
3) A data model helps design the database at the conceptual, physical and logical levels
4) Identifies missing and redundant data
5) In the long-run data modelling makes IT infrastructure upgrade and maintenance faster cheaper
Data models in business are never carved in stone because data sources and business priorities change continually. Therefore, businesses must plan on updating or changing them over time.
How We Can Help
At Insight, we can help you to analyze your data efficiently to gain real-time insights with advanced technology and financial management services. We offer, fully automated data processing system, effective scoring models to make sound decisions, customized dashboards to track matrix, Power BI to make powerful decisions, data analytics techniques to extract valuable insights ,etc. The biggest companies benefit from big data and data analytics. If the most successful entrepreneurs are using techniques such as data modeling, why shouldn’t you?
Contact us today.
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