OLTP (Online Transactional Processing)
For your daily business needs the transaction processing system stores just enough data, such as sales, accounting, inventory etc. – in other words, your routine transactions.
When you couple it with appropriate external data it enables executive decision making – monitoring organization’s performance, developing strategies, and business analytics.
Furthermore, coupled with business environment data and metrics, it opens doors to data mining, finding hidden relationships in data, and machine learning.
And this – if done right – gives you a competitive edge over your rivals.
As your Book of Records systems collect “data”, it becomes “information”; and by handling “the present”, we accumulate “the history”.
An organization that doesn’t remember its past cannot prepare for the future.
So that’s the cycle of data: the present operations – to past information – to insights to the future – which then becomes your new “present”.
Preparing for the better future requires careful decision making, and clean, reliable data to supports that. Organizations that don’t pay close attention to the quality of the data lose their competitive edge, their costs of operations are constantly rising and they are constantly battling unforeseen circumstances and crises.
The data needs to be accurate, timely, relevant and easily accessible. At the same time it needs to be secure and transportable, so you need to strike the right balance with this when handling the data flow.
Data relevance is the primary concern here, and it’s the users of data who decide what’s relevant to their business.
Without their input you could be storing terabytes of irrelevant information, not only paying unnecessary storage costs, but also making it difficult to find the truth in data.
Taking your data to the next level.
When it comes to decision making, smart organizations realize the importance of capturing this data too.
It’s important not to throw away the knowledge of the experienced decision makers and problem solvers, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
This data is stored as a full audit trail of a decision making process, with assumptions, objectives, criteria, alternatives and the outcome. It may seem too hard too formalize, but if you simply start carefully recording minutes, agendas, discussion bullet points, you quickly start seeing the pattern and the data starts to take shape.
Those who refuse to see the importance of this will keep relying on human memory of individuals and will quickly become the dinosaurs in the age of data-driven culture.