One of the more common -- and at the same time serious -- IT-related challenge that faces small to medium-sized businesses is data disorganization. Simply put, there are not many things that can impact an organization's bottom line more directly than the quality of your data. So the question begs to be asked: Why does this situation occur in the first place? Data becomes disorganized for a number of different reasons. The top culprits include data integration quality, latency between data systems, bad source data, and data identification issues. The key to preventing data disorganization is a fundamentally sound business dashboard. Let's delve deeper into the root causes of poor data organization.
A crucial component of ensuring that you have quality data is consistency. In order to achieve a high level of data quality and consistency, data reconciliation is of paramount importance. Data reconciliation is the tool that compares the data found in your Business Intelligence to the application data from the source system. Often, your data integration quality is compromised and suffers because there is a disconnect between the server being used and the data repository. The best way to promote a higher level of data quality is through data mapping. In addition to data mapping being one of the most important components of data integration, it's also at the beginning of the process. If this facet of your data integration process is sound, the odds are far better that the following steps will be successful
By utilizing Business Views, a service in Crystal Enterprise, you can integrate data from various sources. This is achieved by pulling from the Business Elements which are taken from the Data Foundation. In this manner, using Crystal Reports as your business dashboard provides a viable solution for ensuring the quality of your data integration from disparate sources.
It is imperative that your data is coming from a verified source. Further, how can you confirm that there aren't repetitions of the same data? Finding and eliminating redundancies in data records can do wonders for the efficiency of your overall operation.
Solid Business Intelligence provides you with the process to successfully deal with redundancies and duplicate records, thereby increasing your level of business intelligence. Our powerful solutions in Crystal Reports help evaluate the data for redundancies and faulty information.
Using data from the most current date source is vital. In addition, accurate reporting is essential. If you are relying on incorrect data for your reporting -- and in turn basing major management decisions on this faulty data -- you will almost certainly come away with incorrect key performance indicators (KPI's).
Data latency negatively influences your corporate management performance, in turn skewing your business performance metrics. By using the most accurate and current data, you will have greater transparency into the true state of your operations. Based on this quality data, you can set accurate and realistic performance targets.
If your data lacks standardizing parameters, data inconsistencies and issues with identification will result. Data profiling is a BI reporting tool that offers a resolution to these issues by using data analysis to first discover and then properly categorize your data for optimal organization. By employing standardizing characteristics such as data types, field lengths, value sets, and format patterns, you can effectively dictate that your data is clean.
Bad data organization is a common but very serious issue that organizations of all sizes must contend with at some point. Finding the correct solution to ensure a high level of quality with regard to your company's data organization should be at the top of your priority list.
We offer Crystal Reports as the intelligent, versatile solution to your data organization needs. Crystal Reports are flexible and user-friendly, and boasts connectivity to almost any enterprise data source, fully developed features for constructing business logic, all-inclusive formatting and layout schemes, and quality output for either the web or print. In addition, Crystal Enterprise Business Views offers your organization reporting across many different data sources and applications.
Our Whitepaper on Information Management for Midsize Companies discusses some specific challenges that mid-size organizations face, how these affect an organization’s operational effectiveness, and what requirements you should look for in a BI/BPM solution to help address these challenges.