What is an example of data modeling?
Company A is a sports car manufacturing company. Company A wants to know what car models are most saleable, what the customer demographics look like, and which country do they sell most to. This is a classic example of data modeling where the most basic information are required. These need for information is rather universal for any company selling a product or any type of service.
Why would I want good data modeling?
Data modeling is simply being able to organize various databases to make sure that the data in them can be transformed into actionable business information. Its goal is simply to make the information easily understandable and to make sure it can be used to find specific relevant information.
Data modeling collates all data in the company and aligns everyone to minimize mistakes like people working simultaneously on different versions of spreadsheets or not knowing which customers or products need the most effort and attention.
Why is data modeling difficult even for experienced database designers?
There are several challenges surrounding the building of a model. To start with, being able to correctly capture the requirements of the data model is a difficult task because oftentimes when a project implementation starts, requirements start out too vague.
A data modeler on the other hand requires a high degree of accuracy and completeness. That required 180 degree turn from being generally vague to being very precise is what makes it difficult but taking the time to create the model ensures that data is easily understandable such that others can simply read and learn it.
Having tangible business benefits ensures that the data model is tailored to the unique needs of an organization.
How does data modeling affect my business?
Data modeling makes scaling your business easy. With data modeling, you can easily find relevant information and create a report out of it. This is relevant because as you try to grow and scale up as a company you want to see behaviors and trends over time. You want to see who your most profitable customers are, which regions are not performing well and why.
When you only have a few customers as you start out, using spreadsheets is not a problem at all but as your customer base grows bigger and bigger and the business grows out to be more complex, the spreadsheet technique will start giving you problems making you realize it is time to have a more robust system in place.
Is the benefit of data modeling limited only to my finance department?
Most certainly not. The benefits of data modeling spans across the entire organization and even outside of the organization. For example, if your data model can tell you your biggest pain point in the company such as customer retention, you can dig up information on why the customers are dropping out after a certain time frame by analyzing trends and linking them to available information.
With data modeling, you can organize the data in such a way you can trace all the campaigns run by the company and analyze if the campaigns are only limited to prospective customers or what activities are being done to ensure the customers are kept happy after they´ve been won over. As a result, you can improve your customer retention efforts.
Why is it important to look at the background of my database designers?
Being able to design a high performance database is not a work for the inexperienced. It requires a lot of time and it is intricate work. There are several things a database designer has to be good at – data modeling, physical database design, disaster recovery, data integration, security management, among others.
Unfortunately, today´s market is crowded with software designed by people who lack the necessary experience, skill, and understanding as these people are a rare find these days. It is crucial that when you try to evaluate a system, you look at the years of experience of the people who designed the database. It is important that as a customer you understand that you don´t need to bend your processes over and backwards to accommodate the system. Instead, the system must allow you to model your business into it.
Experienced designers understand more the need for a good data model that´s engineered into a design that runs at an incredible speed.
What sets Performance Canvas solution apart?
The designers of Performance Canvas are the same people who created the big brands today including IBM Cognos and Consolidator, Hyperion Enterprise, SAP BPC, Clarity Solution, Frango Consolidation among others.
Performance Canvas came about because of the realization of the designers that it has been more than 20 years since these systems have been developed. They wanted a more modern, dynamic, easily implemented, and reasonably priced system in the market. A tool that truly can be shipped out of the box without ridiculous amounts of customization.
Many things have changed over the years and so they thought it is best to create a new system that addresses the ever changing climate of the market. So with their years of experience, several lessons learned, Performance Canvas came about. A system they developed more than 20 years after. It is a system that seeks to address all the problems that they knew needed upgrading, a system that answers the unarticulated needs of the market, and a system that can genuinely help businesses answer crucial operational questions.
To find out more about Performance Canvas or see a demo of this tool for free, visit www.performancecanvas.com or email us at info@dspanel.com.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
