Why is data maturity the most important part of data strategy? 

In today’s economy, the greatest asset that most businesses have at their disposal is data. Data has been described as the new oil or gold, and its effect on business operations is unrivaled. 

Over the last decade, the world has continued trending towards a more digital economy.

As a result, most commerce is handled online, and the ability to gather data from customers and operations can make or break a company. But it’s not just about gathering data.

Companies can spend all their time figuring out data from customers, vendors, competition, and anywhere else. But that data is useless unless a company knows what to do with it. 

That’s where the concept of data maturity comes in. In this article, we’ll explain the idea of data maturity and why it’s essential for today’s businesses. 

What is data maturity? 

The term data maturity refers to the ability of a company to use the data it gathers over time. As we said earlier, there are tons of avenues that a company can use to collect data. 

But that data doesn’t become nearly as valuable until it is arranged so that it can be interpreted. Someone may give you all the parts for your favorite car, but it’s useless to you if you don’t know how to put it together. 

Take Facebook, for example. The social giant gathers tons of user data to promote its business model. Facebook makes money by selling ads, and it can sell more ads because of the data it owns. 

Facebook’s data collection starts when you create your account. Email, location, age, and sex are a few data points collected when you create your account. 

And that’s just the beginning. Facebook constantly tracks your movement on the platform, logging every click and keystroke you make. 

Liked a new cat video page? Facebook’s taking notes. Have you clicked on that link for your favorite football team? Facebook’s algorithm jotted that down. 

By starting with identifying information, like your name, location, email, and age, Facebook sets a good starting point for collecting mature data.

Afterward, everything you do on the platform can be traced back to you. 

So why is data maturity so important? 

Data maturity is paramount to the success of a business because it simply represents the ability to use the data you’ve gathered.

Conversely, data with no maturity is merely a bunch of letters and numbers on a page with virtually no meaning. 

Back to Facebook, its business model wouldn’t work without data maturity. The platform could constantly track every click of its billions of users. 

But it would provide no benefit without the ability to tie any of that data to any individual user. For example, how can the platform target ads at cat lovers if it doesn’t know exactly which users love cats? 

It may know that there are millions of cat lovers on the platform. But it can make a lot more money from advertisers if it can promise that all cat lovers on the platform will see its ads. 

Data maturity can provide tons of insights for virtually every business out there.

It can help you determine realistic sales goals, protect you from potential threats, and decide when will be the best time to scale up your business.

It can even provide helpful insight into how your competitors succeed in your chosen market. That’s why businesses need to develop or establish a data strategy to take advantage of data collection. 

Data maturity is paramount to a successful business

Data has always been one of the most important assets any business can take advantage of. It can provide priceless insights into your business operations that you can’t get anywhere else. 

And today, more than ever, the maturity of that gathered data is more critical than ever.

You spend as much time as you want gathering data, but if you don’t have a strategy to use that data efficiently, then it’s virtually useless. 

You’ll find that most successful companies today have solid strategies that ensure the data they gather is as mature and helpful as possible. 

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