Outsourcing Data Curation Allows Businesses to Focus on More Strategic Tasks

We live in a data-driven landscape where huge amounts of data are being produced every day. The complexity of managing and using that data are critical, yet most organizations don’t have the time, staff, or budget to source, prepare and gain insights from data while focusing on their core business at the same time. Many struggle to do what they can, but it’s increasingly difficult to stay ahead of expectations. That’s where a partner in data curation comes in.

Taking the step to outsource data curation, much like companies do with other critical functions like payroll, allows the business to concentrate on more strategic tasks while protecting its most valuable resources: its time and its people. Additionally, working with a trusted data partner grants faster and often less expensive access to higher quality data with the benefit of it being backed by years of industry and subject matter expertise. This expertise is especially important if your requirements are more complex.

For example, if your use case requires data in different regions, you need an expert familiar with all local rules, regulations as well as regional variation and nuance. As more companies look to access third-party data, there will be increased dependency on data partners with a longstanding history of providing data accuracy and precision alongside a strong track record of serving businesses of varying scope, size, and industry.

At Precisely, we are both a supplier and a consumer of data.  As a data consumer, we recognize how important it is to source data that fits our specific needs and then evaluate our data suppliers and measure data quality and source confidence on a regular basis.

• We make sure that we understand a supplier’s method of collecting, updating, and merging data.
• We commit to understanding the inner workings of things like their maintenance cycle (the cycle time from real-world change to inclusion in data delivered to customers) as well as error and completion rates.
• We make sure that the data has been collected in a way that is transparent, ethical, and compliant with local laws and best privacy practices.
• We evaluate service delivery characteristics, such as update frequency, on-time delivery of updates, issue resolution and stability of file format.
• We test the data in our own environment, and we assess against our own defined criteria.

We use this same process and criteria to evaluate and assess our own data products and delivery methods as a data supplier.

As a data provider, our business model also begins with understanding use cases and business requirements.  Much of the data that is available—both internal to companies, and from third parties—was created for different purposes than what is needed to solve important business problems.   This requires defining data requirements and product specifications to deliver fit-for-purpose data.

Once we understand what is needed, we can source the materials to build the product. That step is data acquisition. We source those inputs from everything to public data sources, to governments and third-party data providers. We curate that data so that it’s consistent, accurate, up to date, and as complete as possible. From there, we build and package data products as related data sets that are standardized and formatted in a way that makes them more valuable.

Data curation offers high quality data & improved analytics

Our job as data curators is to take the best information from those sources and combine them, with the goal of creating new data products that reflect the essence and value of each of those disparate inputs.  The value we deliver is in the high quality of the data and its ease of usability out of the box.

Our continued investment in technology and innovation enables us to seamlessly procure and manage changes in vendor-supplied data which is key to the creation and management of our data products. Companies in every industry struggle with issues like uncontrolled direct access to vendor’s data platforms, inconsistent storage, access and duplication of sourced data, and inconsistent management of licensing and royalty information. We streamline the tools and processes used to ingest, build, and manage our data products, resulting in data that is consistent, accurate, up to date and as complete as possible.  Our product environment also reduces manual touch points in product development which reduces error and improves product quality.

The time we spend standardizing that data and ensuring its interoperability increases the value of those datasets for our customer base exponentially. Being able to confidently bring trusted data into an environment is critical, but the ability to combine that data with data from other sources to give further context to that data is a top value driver for our customers.

If quality is truly the leading factor in companies’ realization of value from data, then data curation is a necessary part of the equation. So too then is the reliance on a partner that can fully support the increasing requirements to do things like:

• Specify content requirements for intended uses of product(s)
• Source inputs
• Create and maintain build processes
• Design and build quality processes
• Define and deploy business processes (pricing, licensing, etc.)
• Maintain supply chain, product creation, etc.
• Provide first and second level support for products

Precisely prioritizes data curation and can help organizations more effectively control and manage their data over time, reduce time/cost dependencies and monetize cost-effective solutions and services for others. Visit our Data Guide to review our curated data sets.

Learn how companies are rethinking data-driven practices to keep pace and win in today’s digital market, read Changing the Rules of Data, a research report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.