Data is an absolute necessity in today’s business environment. It enables businesses to gain more knowledge about their clients, rival businesses, and themselves. Nowadays, businesses pride themselves on having a data-driven strategy, and being able to use data effectively is one of the most important aspects of business growth.
Many people’s jobs, according to Forrester, “increasingly depend on the self-service availability of accurate, credible data people can use when they need it to complete their daily tasks.” Organizations are skilled at gathering a lot of data from their clients, but the most important data needs to be reliable and accurate.
Improve Your Data Hygiene – Whiteboard Friday
How do you participate in the data hygiene process?
You can participate in the data hygiene process in a variety of ways. To declutter a database and improve its general level of hygiene, data professionals frequently carry out the following procedures:
What is data hygiene?
Data hygiene refers to the degree of cleanliness that your dataset or collection of data has. Data hygiene, in general, refers to any procedure you go through to clean up your data and then maintain that cleanliness. Data should be error-free, easily understood, presented in an orderly manner, and reproducible. The more often data complies with these rules, the better data hygiene it is likely to have. Maintaining good data hygiene is crucial because inaccurate or incomplete data can result in malfunctions, breaks, delays, viruses, and inaccuracies.
Your data’s hygiene can be negatively impacted by any kind of error in a set of data or dataset, including the following:
Why is data hygiene important?
There are many factors that make having good data hygiene crucial, including:
Best practices for practicing data hygiene
There are typically some guidelines to keep in mind when engaging in data cleaning procedures. These practices typically include the following:
Starting with an audit
Start with a thorough audit of all of your systems as a good first step in the data hygiene process. Understanding what needs fixing can help you choose the appropriate steps to take and the best method for doing so. A comprehensive analysis of your data and database is required to conduct an audit and determine how much of it is applicable to your company’s needs. Additionally, doing so enables you to recognize which data points are necessary, which are not, and which require additional support to be successful.
An audit can help you get a realistic idea of how much data you need to clean up before you start the data hygiene process. Once an audit has been completed, you’ll have a solid foundation from which to continue the data hygiene process.
Focusing on the details
Keeping in mind that even minor inconsistencies can result in much bigger problems, it can be especially beneficial to approach the data hygiene process with a focus on the details. You can find inaccuracies, out-of-date data, or incomplete datasets by scrutinizing every little detail in your database. Additionally, by paying attention to the smaller details, you might be able to identify parts of your database that could benefit from various techniques that handle your data in a more uniform way.
Standardizing certain aspects of your database
It can be beneficial to establish a database standard to maintain it as cleanly as possible. By doing this, all data input procedures can be streamlined, expedited, and ensured to be effective. You may consider standardizing the following aspects of your database:
Removing any unnecessary information
As part of the data hygiene process, removing any information from your database that you don’t actually need is crucial. Your database may become cluttered by unnecessary data or by suppressing data, which will prevent it from being as organized and tidy as possible. Consider removing a data point entirely from your database if you can’t use it. Doing so can save you time, effort and even money.
Creating processes for uniformity
The development of specific procedures to guarantee uniformity within the database is essential for data hygiene. This can be achieved by precisely defining and putting into practice standard processes for uniformity. You might think about revisiting these policies and procedures as the company and database expand and making the necessary changes. For instance, you may create processes to address the following:
Considering bringing in a team
Data hygiene can be helped by involving a group of qualified data specialists, at least when you first start the process. Data experts can use their knowledge to analyze numbers, contact details, names, addresses, and other significant details in-depth. If you aren’t an expert in data hygiene, hiring professionals could be very beneficial.
Maintaining cleanliness
It’s crucial to maintain your database’s coherence after you’ve cleaned it up. You can keep a clean database by creating rules for entering or filtering data. You can ensure a high-quality, data-hygienic database by routinely reviewing all datasets and entries.
