Understand the Potential of Data Discovery for Business Growth

Hey, business enthusiast, do you know that data is the main key to get success for businesses? Unfortunately, most businesses don't fully relish the value of their data. According to a 2019–2020 Seagate and IDC survey, organizations fail to use 68% of the total data available to them and 43% of the data that they acquire. How can businesses utilize their data more effectively?

Businesses need a mechanism for discovering, understanding, and pulling insight from their data. Data discovery the process of gathering, analyzing, and managing information from multiple sources—is that mechanism.

Let’s dive in to understand the purpose, procedure, and benefits of data discovery and look at how the correct tools can help businesses get more from their data.

What is Data Discovery and Its Goal?

In easy words, data discovery is a method of exploring and analyzing data to acquire insights and determine trends, patterns, relationships, and other relevant information. It needs a progression of steps along with various tools and techniques to pull meaningful information from enormous volumes of data that organizations can use as a framework to understand their data.

The main goal of data discovery is to help users gain insights from the data and improve their knowledge of specific topics. Various organizations employ the data discovery method in their contexts, including business needs and legal and scientific data, to make informed decisions.

Data discovery helps businesses identify and comprehend their data and enables easy access to specific data collections. It accomplishes this by centralizing data to locate patterns and outliers that would otherwise be hidden. These insights can be used to guide business strategy, data security, and legal and regulatory compliance.

So far, you must have understood that without data discovery, organizations can soon become bogged down in micromanaging individual data streams, missing out on their data's entire value and overlooking security gaps.
With that in mind, let's see the process of data discovery.

A Closer Look into the Process of Data Discovered

Data discovery is an iterative process, which implies companies can continuously gather, examine and refine the data with the help of results and feedback from business stockholders till getting the desired valuable data insights. You can follow this data recovery process for valuable insights as a result.

• Identifying Requirements

Effective data discovery starts with a clear objective, such as understanding customer behavior or finding the solution for a pain point. For instance, a retailer showcases the products on a website to understand which product is more attractive to customers. Or a food company revised the content of a newsletter for email marketing to understand which newsletter has more clicks. To pull valuable and exact data from the ocean of data, first, you have to set your objectives and identify your requirements.

• Incorporating Data from Relevant Sources

For data discovery to be effective, it is crucial to gather and incorporate data from multiple sources because no single data stream tells the complete report. This process is also known as data crunching.

• Refining and Organizing the Data

 This step is the heavy-lifting part of data discovery and an essential part of its value. Refining the data and making it ready for analysis helps organizations lessen the “noise” in their data and get a clearer direction from their data analyses.

• Visualizing the Data

 The data moves to the visualization step once every data point has been transformed into a standardized and coherent format. One of the advantages of excellent data discovery tools is that they present the prepared data in visual representations like charts, graphs, maps, etc., visual data discovery, also known as data mapping offers business specialists access to in-depth insights and practical platforms for visual analysis.

• Analyzing the Data

With information from multiple departments or resources, integrated with external data and purified for analysis, business leaders can gain a complete view of their operations and solve the operational riddles that stand in the way of efficiency.

• Evaluating the learning

 Data discovery is not an isolated event. It is a commitment to continuous improvement. Malcolm Gladwell stated in his best-selling book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become proficient in a particular ability; this also applies to organizations learning to master their data. To develop and function more effectively over time, they must approach data discovery as a way of life. 

Data Discovery Tools that Fuel Your Business

After learning the process of data discovery, to uncover relevant insights that drive decision-making, you need tools to transform raw data into actionable business insights. These insights can help users to foretell future trends and become more proactive. Let’s move on to learn about data discovery tools that can fuel your business.

• A business intelligence tool called Phocas Software assists organizations in gathering and processing their important data from various data sources, ERP systems, and business systems.
• A product and service suite of Microsoft Power BI provides business intelligence (BI), reporting, and data visualization for individuals and teams.
• Business Intelligence (BI) software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool called Domo helps organizations aggregate and transform raw data stored across one or more databases into reports, graphs, and dashboards.
• Spotfire is a powerful enterprise-grade analytical software that enables users to derive and visualize business insights promptly and efficiently.
• Grow.com is a full-stack, no-code, Business intelligence (BI) platform that allows organizations to effortlessly gather and integrate data, transform and analyze it, and derive valuable insights to make data-driven decisions.

What are the Benefits of Data Discovery to Businesses?

Business intelligence is a subset of data discovery. It describes the procedure of collecting and combining data from various databases into a single source, making it simpler to look into and find trends. Let's not wait anymore and quickly learn about the advantages of data discovery for businesses. 

• An Overview of Complete Data

Organizations can see all data streams at a high-level thanks to data discovery. As a result, businesses can develop broad responses to their problems. Data Discovery allows organizations to combine various streams in their analysis and develop well-rounded solutions to their challenges or customer needs. 

• Significant Insights

Data discovery gives a complete sight of a company’s data streams. However, when we discuss noteworthy insights, we also refer to the fact that data discovery enables more individuals in your organization to comprehend data analysis regardless of their technical data literacy.

Don’t worry! You do not have to be a data geek to gain valuable data insights. Data discovery tools provide the ability to understand high-level analytics. 

• Enhanced Risk Management

Risk management has become a critical priority for organizations as the valid cost of data breaches and attacks becomes more apparent. Data discovery can support companies in identifying outliers and potential threats in their accumulated data. As an outcome, businesses can proactively address potential threats and prevent costly data breaches.

• Automatic Data Classification

Organizations are collecting data from different sources than ever before. The data discovery process helps businesses to automatically classify the data they have collected. This enables organizations to examine closely specific data points and streams.

Here is a Summary for You!

For businesses with many data streams, data discovery is a crucial process. Data discovery is the best method for getting a thorough overview of your company's data. Organizations can use data discovery proactively to spur innovation or to monitor their performance reactively and boost the company's growth.