Seek-Gen-Collect Data Phase

The Seek-Gen-Collect Data Phase consist of three steps. These steps are seeking data, data generation and data collection.  

Seeking Data  

An organization that has a good data culture will begin their business process by making an attempt to answer business questions. Questions like  

• How much funds will I invested in this business?  
• What are the chances of success?  
• What are the leading products in this niche?  
• Who are my competitors? 
• Is there a need to test-run the business part-time before going all-out? 
• What are my/our alternatives if I don’t start a business now?  

These questions will prompt the executive team to seek data in the form of answers to position them to best serve their prospective customers. This phase is also for those who are already in business. Their focus will be customer- centric as well as process improvement questions.  

Data Generation  

This step involves getting the right data to answer the business questions for a new start-up. This step calls for the proper attention to detail. The business owner must look out for avenues (variability design, competitor research log, a trending Twitter hashtag) where they can fetch the right dataset to get the data they seek. For existing businesses, every activity within the business generates data. They must look at certain customer segments to get the information to solve customer complaints. The data needed to improve the customer experience, reduce the production cost, and evaluate tax/commission payments are lying somewhere in your organization’s archive or on the cloud.  

Data Collection  

The last step in this phase involves gathering the right data to answer the business questions, evaluate possible business outcomes, support research procedures. The data team must access the proper methods and tools to carry out this process.  Essentially there are two methods one can employ while collecting data. They are  

Primary Method 

This entails the business fetch for data first-hand. There is no bridge or interface between them and the data sources. This approach is quite cumbersome, and resource-demanding however it is best for the data team who are the owners of this acquired data. The tools or techniques they can apply in these methods are  
 

•   Asking the business stakeholders (employee, partners, customers, prospects) certain questions via cold calling, one-one session, email blast.  
•  Brain storming with your executive team or seeking expert opinions (Delphi Techniques)  
• Calling for stakeholder’s town hall meeting (seminars, webinars)  
• The use of forms, questionnaires and survey (online and offline) 

Secondary Method  

This involves the business looking out for already collected data one can use to answer their business questions.  A Boolean search on Bing or Google can fetch certain records from a third-party source that would fit well in this category. A customer biodata list in the company’s database can be considered a secondary data collection method. Other examples include business financial statements, supplier logs, customer product reviews, business journals, website traffic logs and the internet.  

Find out how best to embark on this process by getting a free 30 minutes consulting with us!