Building features for your new, or existing customer-facing application provides valuable new data sources to your current data warehouse, enriching your customer personas and allowing your organization to deliver enhanced personalization and improved customer experience. To ensure you get the most from your new data sources, here are some best practices to keep in mind during the planning and building stages.
Involve executives early in the process. Ideally, these executive team members will be part of the project from the start. At least one executive should be an active sponsor to help steer the project and move it forward with the necessary funding. Ideally, this person will have a need for the data. This way, you’ll be able to ensure that the data helps to support and drive business goals.
In addition to this executive support, you’ll need support from their advisory team. These are the people executives regularly turn to when they need answers or information. Having input from the people closely connected to the day-to-day operations will help you create a more useful product.
The focus of a new data source should be how it will help answer business questions and how it will help achieve business objectives. The data will potentially be used by multiple departments, from sales and marketing to business development. Consider all possible users when determining business goals that your data will assist with.
The temptation with Big Data is to grab every available data point, but that can lead to problems. While it can be helpful to think outside the box, focus your goals on relevant data collection. Select data sources based on their value to your business objectives; this will help keep the project organized and on track.
Defining what constitutes clean and quality data is an important step. Be sure to set a baseline expectation for data quality. Then, get sign-off on that baseline. Build a strong foundation for the project, with stakeholders having a clear understanding of the project’s starting point – its data and the quality of that data.
Building an in-house solution isn’t always the best choice. When adding new data sources through API integrations to either a new, or existing application, it can be best to look to industry-tested solutions
