The importance of Data in 2023
Data is essential to firms/organizations because it allows them to make informed decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. Data can be used to identify patterns, trends, and insights that can inform business strategy, marketing efforts, and operational improvements. Additionally, you can use data to measure the effectiveness of these efforts and adjust as needed. In today's digital age, data can be used to personalize customer experiences, improve products and services, and stay competitive.
Dark data, according to Gartner, is "the information assets organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities but generally fail to use for other purposes."
Taking the Gartner definition, this could relate to all those documents sitting in inboxes as email attachments, or in shared filing systems and/or colleagues' desktops. These are the documents or forms where you have asked someone for information, they have completed them and sent them back to you, and now you have a record.
But here is the downside. You may now have a copy of the document for your record, but the data contained in that document is subject to human error if someone has to rekey it into other systems, such as the CRM or onboarding system. Another downside is that if you send out documents asking for information and file them when you get them back, you will never be able to interrogate the data. You could be losing out on valuable insights.
Let us take, for example, a Supplier Questionnaire. IT departments use this standard document to gather information about a new vendor. It is usually an MS Word document emailed to the vendor, which they duly complete and email back. The document is then filed in a folder and stored. Box ticked, and they proceeded to work with the vendor. But imagine if you have 25 different vendors and would like to report on all of them at once. Then, someone must go into that folder, open all the documents to read the data, and rekey into a spreadsheet to analyze. This process is not only time-consuming but also subject to human error. It could have been avoided had the data been captured at the time of the initial engagement.
Other similar scenarios include Request for Proposals (RFPs), Onboarding and hiring documentation, Requests for Information (RFI), Legal Support Requests, Compliance Forms and Infosec Training, to name a few.
What if starting now, you could activate these documents? Take these documents or any other standard document within your firm/organization and turn them into active applications. You could tag the data points within the document and create a web form using a no-code wizard. The form allows you to capture the relevant data and use this data to populate the document. You still get a copy of the document, but now, the data within that document is available in a usable form. No more rekeying into other systems, which can be subject to human error. You download the spreadsheet with the data, and you can analyze and see if there are any patterns or helpful content that can help you make more informed decisions, more quickly. Or you can, using the APIs, integrate with other systems and transfer the data.
In conclusion, dark data hidden in documents can pose risks to firms and organizations if not appropriately captured and used. These risks include human error when rekeying data and the potential to miss out on discovering any patterns, trends, or insights that could help when it comes to building out strategies and future business plans.
To mitigate these risks, firms/organizations should look to implement a process automation strategy that includes automated tools and technologies to streamline the process of document generation and data capture.