Data Discovery

Understanding how to capture, analyse, use and optimise your data.

Remember this: data discovery is all about uncovering opportunities.

At Elemental Concept, we’ve got a bit of a crush on data. We love what we can do with data, and we’re obsessed with what this means for our clients and their growth plans. Yes, we’re data nerds.

What this means in the real world is that we take the time to understand how you can optimise your data to deliver goals, remain compliant with the necessary governing bodies and use data to unlock new growth or cost-saving opportunities.

By understanding your data and how it is currently being used, we can also identify where you may have potential security exposure, applying our common-sense cyber approach to inform the best way to mitigate this risk.

What are the main elements involved in data discovery?

Data Privacy and Protection

To remain compliant with personal data processing regulations, such as UK & EU GDPR or the Data Protection Act (DPA), businesses must have a thorough understanding of all their data processing activities. Our data discovery service can assist in identifying, categorising, and optimising personal and sensitive data across the company, establishing robust processes and, most importantly, providing peace of mind.

Business Process Optimisation

Our data discovery process allows you to unlock essential information within unstructured data and provides valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and trends. This will help drive well-informed business decisions and create opportunities for growth and development, giving your business a competitive edge. Go you.

Time and Cost Optimisation

The data discovery process aggregates and formats data from various sources and structures, enabling a more accurate and efficient analysis. It provides analysts with the correct data, formatted correctly, allowing decision-makers to capitalise on data-informed opportunities.

What will happen during the data discovery process?

During the discovery process, we ensure that all stakeholders understand your longer-term strategic business objectives. We will identify the specific challenges your organisation faces in achieving those goals and ensure that you clearly understand how your data can enable you to tackle these challenges head-on.

The result will be a comprehensive report detailing all the findings from the discovery process, providing you with complete recommendations for optimising your data to help achieve your longer-term business objectives. For data nerds like us, it’s a great read, believe us.

The four key steps in a data discovery process are:

Prep Work

The first step is prep. We work with you to understand your key business drivers and identify any barriers to success which are preventing your business from reaching its full potential. We’ll also ask you to provide a high-level overview of the types of data assets you have, how they are currently used, who has access to them and where they are stored.

When we’re looking at the data you have, it’s always with outcomes in mind, and how data can make that happen. Some of the things we’ll look at include:

Performance monitoring
Transactional insights
Purchasing decisions

and many more.

Every business will have different data and different goals, but by starting with the end outcomes, it means we’re always guided by what really matters in your business.

Operations Audit

Here’s where we get nosy.

Data can be overwhelming, especially when you’ve got lots of it from past and present. Where do you even start to use and learn from it? We get it. We’re here to help guide that process for you.

An operations audit is a deep dive into how your business operations are structured across people and processes. This could cover areas such as:

Core people capabilities
Value chain
Relevant regulations
Corporate policies
Stakeholders and decision-makers

Tech runs on bytes and behaviours.

We’ll not only look into your products and services, key business performance metrics and the data needed to support these but also identify and analyse the behaviours the metrics drive.

Data Audit

Our nosiness knows no bounds.

Hand in hand with the operations audit will be an in-depth data and technology audit focusing on your data and infrastructure architecture.

We’ll take the time to understand your data sources and quality and your general data strategy, covering any data warehouse, storage and management requirements, data transfer mechanisms, and infrastructure set-up.

Our audit also encompasses business intelligence, machine learning and AI, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of these key areas. We’ll also ensure your regulatory compliance is up to standard.

Full Audit Report

At this point, we’ll have a deep understanding of your company, operations, processes and data management, allowing us to consolidate and compile a report of findings, problem areas and identified opportunities for improving the way you capture, manage and optimise your data. This invaluable resource will also identify opportunities for how artificial intelligence and machine learning may enhance the data (exciting!)