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It’s no secret that the sheer size and availability of data, types of data and ways to access data have evolved considerably over the past several decades. Now, this evolution seems to be growing more rapidly than ever. Your company is deeply engrained in this transformation – data is everywhere!! In addition, everywhere you turn, there’s a free online course or seminar discussing the endless jargon, data mining and visualization techniques at a contrived, theoretical level.  You have to ask yourself, does anyone know where the rubber meets the road to actually harness this stuff to improve an actual business?

This can be very daunting and cause you to shy away from utilizing all the data at your fingertips to help analyze, investigate and ultimately solve many business problems that your company may be facing. At the heart of it, you may find yourself going down the path of fearing your data. Once the data continues to pile up, you could eventually find yourself extremely data rich but enormously information poor.

At Kenway, we have an entire capability devoted to data, aptly named “Information Insight”. We have a detailed methodology devoted to it:

Kenway uses this methodology to create meaningful, descriptive metrics and information that are used to bridge the gap between mysterious raw data and crucial business problems. End results may be the reduction of expenses, increases in revenue or even increased transparency into new insights that lead to the identification of other opportunities that otherwise would have remained hidden.

How did Kenway create this methodology? How do we continue to evolve and enhance this methodology? The answer lies at the core of Kenway and why we exist. Our culture is built on the maxim: “To Help and Be Helped”. Our employees stay true to this adage by being entrepreneurial in nature, highly motivated and enthusiastic in climbing the learning curve as it applies to mastering and applying new skills and techniques. We lead by example by practicing what we learn day in and day out.

Today, I am in my third year at Kenway. Year one, I decided to master the business intelligence tool Qlikview, and I immediately helped a long-standing client merge multiple data sources to glean new insights that were previously hidden. Year two, I tackled learning a multi-paradigm programming language, C#, and used this to take advantage of a 3^rd party vendor’s API (a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software and applications) to extract data to form key performance indicators. Over the course of year three and heading into year four, I am developing and enhancing my knowledge in HTML, JavaScript and CSS.  These skills will allow me to aid clients in such areas as building out SharePoint sites or pulling data and creating metrics that are viewed via portals and websites to deliver these newly found data insights to business users in ways that make it easier to make decisions.

Rolling back up to the company level, what this means is that at our core, we are always looking to evolve and grow, just as I did these past few years with my own skill set. As data and the tools used to work with it evolve, we evolve as well by continuing to learn and to implement our newfound knowledge. At Kenway, we never fear the data. In essence, we are eager to engage the data and attack it at every angle, so our clients gain the most valuable insights and benefits. If you’re feeling data rich and information poor or would just like to exchange insights on other data methodologies or tools, let us know at info@kenwayconsulting.com.