by Angela Guess
A recent article sheds some light on villainous problems confronting data professionals and how they can be defeated. It begins, “As a data analyst, you’ll have to confront your share of villains. They may even have terrifying names like Big Data, Dirty Data or Data Chaos. OK, maybe these aren’t such villainous names but left unchecked they can cause major problems for data analysts and company executives alike. Why? Well, for one thing, big data poses big challenges for traditional analytics approaches.”
It continues, “That’s because while your company’s focused on the volume and variety of ‘big data,’ it doesn’t really spend enough time figuring out how to transform the massive amounts of stored, raw, structured and unstructured data into useful, real-time business intelligence to make better decisions. Then there’s your archenemy, dirty data, which can be a huge headache. Dirty data is data that contains numerous errors like misspellings, duplicate data, data entered in the wrong fields. Dirty data in your system can result in slower performance, reports that are incorrect, and it can cause your software to crash or freeze.”
“And let’s not forget data chaos,” the article adds. “If you want to make the best business decisions, you have to be sure the data is consistent from system to system and from business unit to business unit. Now that you know who your enemies are, like any self-respecting superhero, you have to figure out how to defeat them and turn potentially disastrous situations into opportunities to make your business more successful.”
photo credit: PopCultureGeek.com
