James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik, explains how leveraging unstructured data is essential for business growth.

Global economic growth has not been great over the last five years, with growth falling steadily or not meeting previously set expectations. Looking ahead, 2024 is when we come out of the slump and flip the trend upwards. According to IDC, the market outlook is currently looking favourable, with rates stabilising and 40% of businesses reporting that they are planning to accelerate their spending on digital tech over the next twelve months. 

For companies to grow, they need to understand what is happening, i.e. how they are performing across markets and how their customers feel. As always, the answer to these questions is in the data. Until now, businesses have focused on bringing insights from their structured data points into one centralised system and visualisation board, where they can be easily monitored, accessible and understood.

In 2024, it is time we tackle an increasingly growing elephant in the room: the vast amounts of unstructured data within companies.

Bring unstructured data to the growth party

The spread of generative AI use over the last twelve months has significantly increased the amount of information companies have available about their customers. This is great news if you have a system in place to process said data, but if you don’t, it only adds to the problem of having too much data and no way to gain insights from it.

This unstructured data, if deciphered, can be a real game changer and growth driver. These additional key insights and understandings from unstructured data sources could be exactly what your business needs to keep growing in 2024.

Uniting structured and unstructured data

An example of how unstructured data can add value and growth to your business is our work with the Domino’s Pizza. With over 15,000 stores in more than 85 markets, Domino’s was drowning in data. The company had over 85,000 structured and unstructured data sources that it wanted to integrate to get a single, holistic view of its customers and operations globally. Still, it did not have the necessary data and IT structure to do so.

The solution was a unified platform that managed all the diverse data points and provided users with real-time insights and analytics. Together with Qlik and Talend Data Fabric software, we built a centralised data tracker that collects data points from Domino’s sales systems, supply chain centres and channels, allowing for real-time streaming and data visualisation and analytics.

This has since provided Domino’s store managers across the globe with a single and reliable source of truth that they can access anytime to, among other things, project demand and predict staffing requirements accordingly.

Conclusion

Your data is only worth what you get from it, so it’s vital that you make the most of all the available structured and unstructured data, so you can make decisions based on all your available data.

Only when businesses have a holistic, comprehensive understanding of their operations across the board can they truly gain insights into their customers, operations, and markets.

This in turn can help them make better decisions, improve their bottom line and take confident next steps to grow their business in 2024.