Data visibility benefits, challenges and how to get started

What is data visibility?

Data visibility is the measure of how easy or difficult it is for an organisation to collect, collate, store, monitor, display, access, visualise and analyse their data. Many organisations deal with large volumes of data, therefore effectively gaining data visibility across the organisation's multiple systems can be challenging. However, data visibility is a necessity for organisations that are looking to make well-informed decisions, drive growth and plan and forecast accurately.

The benefits of data visibility

We believe that data visibility is essential for any high-growth business and here is why:

Make well-informed decisions

Data visibility enables the business leadership to make well-informed decisions based on their data, whether that is target marketing with data on the success of campaigns and or developing sales strategies based on customer data. Leaders can make decisions confidently to navigate their business in the right direction.

Reduce and mitigate corrective actions required

Valuable hand and data on existing and historical performance enable the decision made to be more accurate. This can help you significantly reduce and mitigate the corrective actions required. For example, if you are looking to launch a new product line, without any data to back your decisions, you may find it challenging to make it a success.

Improve your data security

According to a 2022 Cloud Security Report, more than a third of businesses are citing visibility into infrastructure security as the biggest challenge to ensuring cloud security. When you have visibility of your data, you know where it is being generated, which systems it's associated with and how it is stored which enables you to improve your data security. Ensuring data security is essential for every business, therefore a good understanding of your vulnerabilities with data visibility can help reduce the risk of any data security leaks or loss.

Build team confidence in their work

Data visibility helps empowers leaders to make better decisions, it also helps the team to have confidence in their work. By being able to access and analyse relevant data, teams can feel encouraged to work with a sense of direction.

Gain an understanding of performance and more

With a bird's eye view, data visibility enables a great understanding of business processes, activity and performance. Without data, it can be nearly impossible to spot inefficiencies to improve or opportunities to take advantage of.

Accurate forecasting and predictions

Data visibility drives data science. Data analysis and accessibility can help data science teams to garner insights to accurately forecast and make predictions. This enables businesses to steer the business in the right direction.

Adapt to change and be agile

Data visibility and accessibility enable organisations to become agile by adapting to change quickly and efficiently. Whether it's fast-evolving consumer demands or changes in the market, businesses will be better able to make decisions and adapt with data visibility.

Challenges of getting data visibility

Gaining data visibility across your entire organisation will take significant time and resources especially if you do not have sufficient infrastructure in place. Some other challenges you may find include:

Large volumes of data

If you are dealing with large data sets, it can be challenging to build an infrastructure that can handle the volume and the scale of data. Therefore, you should consider working with experts to help you set your data infrastructure in place.

Disparate systems

The more sources of data you are trying to collate and bring in data from, the more complex and challenging it can be. You would need to ensure a structured, robust system to ensure your data is performing at optimal performance. Building ELT data pipelines to collect and collate data in a warehouse is one option for taking the step towards data visibility.

Budget

Budget can often be a major factor in delaying or deprioritising investing in your data. There are two ways to consider this. Firstly, the ROI from investing in your data visibility is significant and in line with the variety of benefits listed above. Secondly, if you do not have the budget to build a team in-house, consider working with an experienced data engineering company that provides expertise and guidance.

Stakeholder buy-in

Ensuring a stakeholder buy-in can be a challenge, however, calculating the ROI of your investment in data may be a way to sway the stakeholders. Data visibility can provide invaluable benefits and this needs to be relayed to get the stakeholders on board. Additionally, working with experts in the field should help build the confidence of the stakeholders.

5 steps to gaining visibility

Getting started with data visibility will depend on where you are in your journey of data engineering. However, if you are starting from scratch, here are some steps you may take:

1. Identifying the objectives, key systems and data sources
2. Develop data pipelines to collect the data from the multiple sources identified
3. Build a data warehouse to collate and store the data
4. Invest in data reporting and BI solutions to visualise and analyse data to gain insights
5. Ensure your data systems and flow of data are running with optimised performance with ongoing operational monitoring and support

Ardent, helping you uncover powerful insights

If gaining data visibility is a key objective for your business, we can help. Our highly experienced data engineering team has worked with a wide variety of data for clients across industries. Explore some of our client successes:

• Optimizing big data queries to ensure a speedy turnaround on data analysis to improve organisation efficiencies
• Ensuring high data accessibility and data accuracy with robust, scalable data pipelines with AWS infrastructure
• Confidence in ensuring data availability and accessibility for end clients with expert operational monitoring and support

Unlock the potential of your data by gaining game-changing insights from your data. Get in touch to find out more or explore our data engineering services.

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