Introduction
Data analysts will increasingly collaborate closely with marketing, finance, operations, and other departments to provide insights specific to business needs. However, businesses worldwide face challenges when implementing machine learning, artificial intelligence, or natural language processing. In this article, we explain common data analytics challenges and solutions for businesses. Explore more with our data analytics course syllabus.
Data Analytics Challenges Facing Businesses
When employing data analytics, businesses encounter several obstacles, such as:
Data Quality
Challenge: Data quality means ensuring the information gathered is accurate. Making sure the data they gather is accurate is one of the main issues that most organizations deal with.
- Inaccurate insights and bad decision-making might result from data that is inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, or duplicated.
- Non-standardized data, such as different date formats, currencies, or units, can also be problematic.
Solutions:
Organizations may guarantee that their data is accurate, consistent, comprehensive, accessible, and safe by putting solutions like data validation, data cleansing, and appropriate data governance into practice.
- Better analysis will be feasible and cleaning efforts will be reduced if as much standardization is done as soon as possible.
- There are numerous tools available for improving, deduplicating, and preparing data; ideally, your analytics platform has some of these features built-in.
Better decision-making can result from using this high-quality data as the basis for efficient data analysis.
Data Privacy and Security
Preserving data from online dangers and gathering and evaluating it ethically and legally ensures data privacy and security.
Challenge: The constant difficulty of limiting access to data necessitates both security technology and data classification.
- High-level consideration must be given to who is permitted access to vital operational systems to recover data, as any harm done here has the potential to destroy a company.
- Companies must ensure that users from various departments only view the data they need to see when they enter into their dashboards.
- Every stage of the data collection, analysis, and dissemination process requires businesses to set up robust access controls and make sure that their analytics and data storage systems are safe and in compliance with data protection laws.
Solution: You must comprehend the nature of the data before you can determine which roles should have access to different kinds of pools of data.
To do that, a data classification system must be implemented. You can perform the following:
- Look at what you have: Determine what kinds of data your company gathers, keeps, and uses, then categorize it according to its level of sensitivity, the possible repercussions of a breach, and any laws it must abide by, like GDPR or HIPAA.
- Create a matrix for classifying data: Create a schema with distinct categories, such as internal use only, public, and confidential, and provide rules for applying these classifications to data according to your company’s policies, legal needs, and sensitivities.
- Check out who could be interested in access: Describe who is responsible for what in terms of access control, ownership, and data classification.
- For instance, a member of the HR team will have different access rights than an employee in the financial department.
- Collaborate with data owners to classify your data according to the categorization policy.
- Consider data classification solutions that can automatically scan and classify data according to your established standards after you have a plan in place.
- Now, implement suitable data security rules and provide your staff with training on them, stressing the significance of adequate data handling and access controls.
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Resistance to Change
Companies could be hesitant to implement new procedures and equipment for gathering and evaluating data.
Challenge: Using data analytics frequently necessitates a degree of change that may be unsettling.
- Teams are suddenly presented with new knowledge about the state of the company and a variety of options on how to respond to it.
- The change may also make leaders who are used to acting more on instinct than facts feel threatened or challenged.
Solution: IT personnel should work with various departments to comprehend their data requirements before explaining how new analytics software might enhance their workflows in order to avoid such a backlash.
- IT teams may demonstrate during the implementation how improvements in data analytics result in deeper insights into data, more effective workflows, and ultimately better business decision-making.
Lack of Talent
Locating qualified individuals with the necessary skills to work on data science projects.
Challenge: Many businesses struggle to get the skills they need to transform their massive data sources into knowledge that can be used.
- There is a greater need for data scientists, analysts, and other data-related positions than there are competent workers with the requisite abilities to manage challenging data analytics projects.
- Furthermore, there are no indications that the demand is leveling off.
- According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs requiring data science skills is expected to increase by almost 28% by 2026.
Solution: A lot of analytics solutions now come with sophisticated data analytics features that business users without expertise in data science can use, like integrated machine learning algorithms.
- Data analysts can increase productivity with tools that provide automated data preparation and cleaning features.
- Additionally, businesses can upskill by identifying workers with technical or analytical backgrounds who may be interested in moving into data roles and providing them with the skills they need through paid training programs, online courses, or data boot camps.
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Pricing Challenge
Infrastructure, personnel, and technology investments are necessary for data analytics.
Challenge: Big data analytics can be costly and necessitate a large initial outlay of funds.
- However, if companies are unclear about the advantages of an analytics endeavor, IT staff could find it difficult to defend the expense of carrying out the project effectively.
Solutions: Most upfront capital expenditures can be avoided and maintenance costs can be decreased by implementing a data analytics platform using a cloud-based architecture. Additionally, it can control the issue of an excessive number of one-off tools.
Poor Data Visualizations
By using data visualization techniques to turn data into graphs or charts, complex information can be presented in a clear, accurate, and understandable manner.
Challenge: Poor business decisions might result from charts that are inaccurate or deceptive.
- Incorporating too much data or employing an inappropriate visualization technique might result in inaccurate findings and deceptive visuals.
- The generated report may be inaccurate due to input errors and simplistic representations.
Solutions: Start with the three main ideas listed below:
- Recognize your audience: Adapt your graphics to your audience’s interests.
- Steer clear of complicated charts and technical jargon, and choose your data carefully.
- A department head and a CEO have rather distinct information needs.
- Keep it simple: Stay clear of adding extraneous details to your visualization.
- For improved readability, use succinct headlines, clear labeling, and a limited color scheme.
- Stay clear of any chart kinds, distorted features, or false scales that could skew the data.
- Start with a specific goal in mind. Don’t rely just on a pie or bar chart. There are numerous visualization choices, each with a specific function.
- Scatter plots display the correlations between variables, line charts display trends over time, and so forth.
- Knowing the following will help you select the best kind of chart.
- With your facts, what narrative are you attempting to convey?
- What is the main point you want the audience to remember?
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Data Integration Challenge
Challenge: It can be challenging to integrate data from several sources, including social media, call centers, and website logs, due to the various data formats. It includes the following:
- Multiple data sources: Managing a variety of data sources can be challenging.
- Data Silos: Collaboration is hampered by data silos that are only available to particular departments.
- Different Data Formats: Inconsistent data, storage expenses, and financial losses result from storing the same information in various formats.
- Data Delivery Delays: Real-time data processing is hampered by data delivery delays.
Solutions: The above data integration challenges can be resolved with the following solutions:
- Select the Appropriate Data Integration Tool: Avoiding many data sources requires careful selection of integration software.
- Organize Data Centrally: All company data should be kept in a cloud-based data lake or warehouse to avoid data silos.
- Data optimization: To eliminate duplicates, use deduplication techniques such as Dedupely.
- Data Management: Data management is aided by data integration, but continuous supervision is essential. Make use of cloud systems that offer elastic and scalable resources.
- Different Data Formats: Ensure that the organization’s data formats are uniform. Make use of data integration technologies that can handle different file types.
- Adapt a Quicker Solution: Make use of a platform that can take advantage of trigger events, such as a lead completing a form.
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Conclusion
Addressing a wide range of challenges, from data collection to interpretation and decision-making, is necessary for effective data analysis. Learn more with our data analytics training in Chennai.
