Why do we need it?

Proper acquisition, management and use of your data is essential to enable you to analyze it and use the resulting information effectively. Unstructured data is often difficult to understand and use, wasting time and resources in its analysis and utilization.

By structuring your data today, you create a solid foundation for future innovation. Structured data is easier to manipulate and analyze, so it can be leveraged to identify trends, opportunities and problems more quickly. You can then use this information to develop, improve and optimize your processes, and make more informed decisions.

In fact, structuring data in this way facilitates collaboration within your organization. When properly exploited, information is shared more easily and becomes more comprehensible to all, optimizing communication and maximizing efficiency throughout the company.

Finally, structured data is more reliable and brings you closer to regulatory compliance. Well-structured data is easier to track and audit, which can help you meet data privacy, consumer protection and security standards.

In short, structuring your data today will enable you to innovate more effectively tomorrow, by providing you with a solid foundation on which to build new value-added processes.

How do you do it?

Structuring data can be a complex process, requiring careful planning and a thorough understanding of the data and its context. Here are some important steps to structuring your data:

Identify data sources: To begin with, you need to identify the data sources you have and what data you want to work on. These sources can be databases, spreadsheet files, paper documents or any other type of relevant data.

Define objectives: now that you've identified your data sources, you need to define your structuring objectives. What do you want to achieve by structuring this data? What type of information would you like to extract? What is the desired final format? Ask yourself the right questions to define your current structuring criteria, but also take into account those you'll be facing in the future. You don't want your decisions to become a limitation on the future development of your organization.

Establish structuring standards: standards define how data should be organized. It's important to decide how to name fields, determine data types and create consistent conventions. Document these standards so that everyone can follow them.

Clean up the data: often the data identified contains errors, duplicates, outliers and sometimes some data is missing. So, before you start structuring your data, you need to clean it up using business rules to avoid processing superfluous data.

Structure the data: you're now ready to structure the data according to what you've established. 

Check data quality and conformity: once you've structured the data, you need to check its quality! This means making sure your data is accurate, complete and consistent. As part of a continuous improvement approach, you can set up regular automated data quality measurement reports, which will enable you to produce better quality data in the future.

Secure the data: finally, you need to secure the data to ensure that it is protected, since your data is an important asset for your organization!

Want to learn more about how Momentum Technologies can help you with your data?

Contact us now for more information :  info@momentum-tech.ca