The Steps Your Consultant Will Take To Prepare Data

Data analytics are a great investment that many companies find useful for improving marketing and other business strategies. However, it is a complex process that many executives don’t understand and leave completely to their consultants. If you want to understand the process that your analytics consultant takes to give you solutions, you need to know the basic steps they take. Here are the details of each of the basic steps.

Discover

The first step is gathering the necessary data to help a company meet its goal. This is the most time-consuming part of data preparation. Fortunately, tech-savvy businesses with data repositories make it easier for consultants to gather the data they need. Consultants combine what is in the repository with profiling statistics and any other numbers they can find. This gives them a large pool of information that they need to accomplish their end goal.

Detain

The next step towards creating usable management strategies and other information from data is to detain it. At this step, they are simply holding on to the data so that your consultant can use it to fuel the rest of the steps in the preparation process. The most basic way they do this is by using a spreadsheet. More advanced solutions that allow consultants to share their work with their clients include relational databases, network file systems, and big data repositories. The use of this in-memory or cloud technology allows the data to be organized appropriately. In other words, the detaining area is like a temporary staging area until your consultant can distill the data.

Distill

From there, an analytics consulting firm will distill the data. Here, the consultant refines the data by determining which is fit for use. Additionally, they need to evaluate the quality of the data collected. In other words, they filter through the data and determine what is not usable or irrelevant. Any data that your consultant cannot validate or irrelevant to a company’s desired project will be removed from the collection.

Document

The documenting stage is about recording the metadata about all of the data gathered and distilled. This includes the various technical definitions, data lineage, business terminology, changes applied during distillation, data usage recommendations, relationships to other information, stewards, and related governance policies. This is the information that is used to make recommendations about the client’s strategies.

Deliver

The final step is to convert the documented information into a format that executives can easily process. This will mean making the original data easy to understand and incorporating documented metadata. This is often done with computer software that can generate graphics. Once this is complete, the information is usable by the client and ready to be delivered.

These are the basic steps for the data preparation process. They ensure efficiency and reliability for data projects. This makes it so you can rely on the results that your consultant gives you. Understanding this process helps you trust your consultant more. Then, you will be more likely to follow their recommendations and make data-driven decisions.