Accurate Record Keeping

Never has data been so much in the news. Whilst the numbers tell us nothing of the heartache behind them, they do tell scientists how best to handle Coronavirus and how to minimize its impact. We have all become familiar with R0 values, curves, and moving averages. Software like Microsoft Power BI is being used to analyse and visualize the data, and to make it more understandable.

At the same time, the importance of accurate record keeping has become more apparent. As the Head of Mortality Analysis at the Office of National Statistics (ONS) points out, counting the number of Covid-19 deaths may be important, but it is not simple. Issues such as the speed with which data can be recorded and disseminated, accuracy and consistency of classification, and missing data all contribute to how trustworthy the data is.

These issues are important when lives depend on the decisions that are made on our behalf.

Thankfully in business we are not often dealing with life and death. But we still need accurate data. Getting a good understanding of how many people have been trained in specific courses, by role and by date, for example. Or understanding how many meetings with clients by industry type, and outcome. These are not complex ideas, but getting the data is not always straightforward.

The issues with health data and business data are the same in how the data is stored. Both count something and then analyse it by a number of attributes. In the business intelligence terms, these are known as facts and dimensions. Facts are the things you count, and dimensions are how you analyse the numbers. The number of cases is a fact, and age group is a dimension. There are normally many dimensions for each fact.

As more businesses are working to become more data led, and less opinion led, keeping accurate data becomes vital. If you are making decisions based on inaccurate data, your decisions could be less than optimal, or just plain wrong.

The good news is that data has never been easier to manage, analyse and visualize. Microsoft Power BI is being used extensively to help manage the Coronavirus pandemic, and to help businesses make better decisions. It is an inexpensive piece of software, very powerful, and encourages sharing of data.

If you want to move from an opinion led business to a data led business, get in touch.  If you want help getting your data into shape so you can analyse it, we offer consultancy and development on the Microsoft Data Platform, including Power BI, SQL Server and Excel.