Introduction
“Without data you’re blind and deaf in the middle of the freeway” – Geoffrey Moore
Well, that paints the exact picture of a potentially fatal disaster! However, even with access to clean and timely data, you’re not completely in the safe zone. The real lifesavers are the tools that allow you to harness the actual information from the underlying raw data and make productive business decisions based on it. Data management tools today can be custom built by your organization or purchased off the shelf but which of the two holds more benefits?
We list four major ways in which a third party solution fares better than a custom-built tool.
1. Saves Resources
For an organization, building and maintaining a data management platform is an arduous task. Pooling in large sums of money on development, allocating time and resources to the process from start to the point where it is implemented is taxing. Furthermore, since, it is a newly built system it is prone to errors and rarely comes with any bells and whistles. It is a series of potential headaches that might do your company more harm than good.
On the contrary, third-party management softwares are typically mature and are continually put under the test by multiple clients. They have easily accessible references that can be helpful in validating how the solution will meet your needs. This not only saves you costs but also preserves time, which is a much more precious resource.
2. Access To A Larger Database
As an organization, you primarily have access to data that is based on a temporal business need and is restricted to a certain market segment. This limits your reach and growth to a certain extent. A third-party management tool can prove to be helpful in this cause too. The right data management tool will have a larger data library of relevant information for you to select from, allowing you to scale your needs and expand your requirements at a fraction of the time and cost. It presents you with an opportunity to leverage powerful pre-existing tools to better understand your market, develop better business strategies, and expand your portfolio.
3. Grants Your Analytics A Professional’s Touch
Most third-party data management tools are designed by experienced professionals who program them with functionality and algorithms that extract the most effective results from raw data. A business on its own might not have access to the right professionals to help transform the data into actionable steps. However, with these tools, they can process data to retrieve actionable and insightful information that is clear and sorted in a manner that allows better strategy making at all levels. Further, you’ll find that these professionals bring a lot of experience and a perspective that is different from your own showing you new possibilities and enhanced capabilities.
4. Allows Effective Decision Making
Data, in its original form holds no meaning to a firm because it doesn’t provide any substantial or actionable information. A good data management tool converts data into a more meaningful format so that companies can obtain information that might help them in their decision making process. For example, you may need to view a market trend, create a forecast or model, settle with or invoice a counter-party or customer or integrate with a wide variety of enterprise downstream systems. Regardless of what you need the data for, having rapid access to information and being able to leverage a wide variety of off the shelf components significantly expands your ability to use data within your organization and provides you with a more efficient and effective business.
Conclusion
Effective data management tools in the digital realms of today have become an absolute necessity if you wish to be able to tackle your competition effectively. This is where third-party data management tools come in. They hold an edge over custom-built platforms because of a host of factors, like allowing better utility of resources, granting you access to a larger data catalogue, and facilitating effective decision making. What more can a business ask for!