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Hey there, I’m glad you’ve found your way to the first entry of the Paribus Data Diary! To start with, I thought it would be interesting to document a recent interview with Paribus 365 CEO, Mark Cooper, about data. Online communities and businesses are creating large volumes of it every day. In fact, there’s now so much of it, that it is often difficult to understand what it really means and know how to deal with it. For help, read Mark’s thoughts on the topic below.
According to DOMO, by the end of 2020 there’ll be 40x more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe. How can we rationalize statistics such as this and what they actually mean?
What do we mean by digital footprint? There are many ways to describe it. We create our digital footprint through the things we do, the services we’re involved in, our various social media channels, and the use of our smartphones. Every single smartphone today has a camera, something that going back to my early childhood each household was lucky to have one of! Now everyone has a camera at their fingertips, and they’re all taking digital photographs. And the data associated with these images has to go somewhere. That’s when we have to start being pragmatic about the significance of the data in our digital footprint and how much of it is actually relevant to us.
Let’s stick with the topic of smartphones and their cameras. I don’t know about you, but I use my phone to take pictures of everything. Largely because I’m pretty lazy! For example, if I’m interested in a product, rather than writing stuff down about it on paper there and then, I’ll take a picture of it to remind me to go and do some deeper research on it at a later date. My phone’s camera has become more than just that; it’s become my note-taker, a diary if you will. The problem with this is that when I look at my camera roll, I’m suddenly up to 2,000 – 3,000 photographs. Some of them are relevant, some of them completely irrelevant, some of them so old that I can’t even remember taking them! So, how do we best manage this? Well, most smartphones these days have the ability to search your camera roll by typing in particular terms. For instance, if I knew I took a picture of a sofa I was interested in buying, I can search for the word “sofa” and it will shortlist all the images I’ve got of sofas in my photo album. This is one way we have of controlling our digital footprint.
The idea of a smartphone is useful to relate to people in their everyday lives. But you’re right, we also need to consider this issue from a business perspective. In many respects, data is a company’s biggest and most precious asset. Like most things though, if this data is not cared for, we’re in for some serious trouble. This is the ugly side of business and data that people usually avoid talking about.
I often think of it like walking into a car showroom. You see a gleaming, brand new, and nicely polished car that’s begging you to buy it. However, no one really wants to address what’ll happen when it needs maintenance and how it’ll look after 10,000 miles of driving. Unless you put a little bit of effort back into it, it’s never going to look as it did the first time you saw it in the showroom.
It’s the same with a CRM. We always think adopting a new system is going to be fantastic and everything we want it to be, but very few of us are prepared when it comes to managing the data within it further down the line. We need to ensure that there is effort applied to keeping that data in shape. It needs to be regularly put through its paces and cleansed so that it's back to the same way it was when we initially bought the system.
I hope this interview has given you some food for thought.
Mark Cooper
CEO
Paribus 365