30th August 2024

In the dynamic world of Technology Service Providers (TSPs), data is one of the most important assets.

Data can give you the power to improve your services, optimise the delivery of your accounts, find new opportunities to grow your business and much more. However, harnessing this potential can be a real headache, especially when faced with the complexities of messy, inconsistent data.

So, what are the main issues that cause these headaches and how can you overcome them?

The Data Dilemma

Most organisations grapple daily with their data for numerous different reasons, the main reasons we see are:

Silos and Inconsistency
Different parts of the organisation may collect and store data in different ways. Teams often have their own definitions and naming conventions and may store the data in different formats or systems entirely.

Clean at the Core
Companies often start with a nice, manageable, clean core of data and technology. Over time, as the company grows, sometimes through mergers and acquisitions, we have to adopt different technologies, disrupting the neat core of data.

The Black Box
There is a trend in technology as a whole to shield the inner workings of systems from the users. With data, analytics and decision making, this can lead to uncertainty. Not knowing the provenance of the data, when it was last updated or how it has been transformed can lead to a lack of trust in the data or to it being discounted altogether.

The Five Steps to Data Clarity

To address these challenges, we have developed a framework that will not only give you complete data clarity but will also allow you to unlock the full value from your data:

1 - Source, Integrate, Clean-Up and Profile Source Data
First, we need to map out the shape of your business and the interplay between different business areas, known as planets in Hublsoft. For example, as a services business, you will need to know about incidents and assets, and we know there is a connection between them. It's really important that this is done as a completely non-technical exercise, we don't care about the underlying data at this point.

2 - Transform and Prepare Data
The next step is to start and connect the data sources you have to the planets. You may have multiple data sources that feed into one planet, but that is ok; with Hublsoft, we can ingest and transform all of this data into one single source of truth.

3 - Capture Business Concepts
Once the data is in your platform, you need to isolate the data that matters to the business problem you are looking to solve. Using our earlier example, you may want to know which assets are causing the most disruption for your customer within a specific region. In Hublsoft, you can save these business insights as Lenses, which you can then use and reuse for lots of different analysis across your business.

4 -Augment with New Business Level Data
Sometimes the raw data you have is not necessarily at the level that you need for decision making. In these cases, you may need to augment your business landscape with new data sources that combine or abstract existing data to create another data layer. For example, you may want to optimise the operating margins by identifying and reducing avoidable incidents. The concept of avoidable incidents does not exist in the raw data, so we need to capture this in a new way and represent that as a data set.

5 - End-to-End Visibility and Traceability
As we have mentioned, it is important to have complete visibility and traceability across all of your data so that you can completely trust the analysis you conduct and the business decisions that you make and implement off the back of this. The Hublsoft platform allows all users to trace all of the data back to its source, including when it was last updated, where the data originated from and most importantly, if there have been any issues with the most recent data ingest.

In a world that is becoming increasingly data-driven, the ability to effectively manage and leverage your data is becoming more significant and, if done correctly, will give you a huge competitive advantage. Using a Decision Intelligence platform like Hublsoft offers the most comprehensive framework to help you extract the true potential of your data.