Top Tips for Collecting and Using the Business Data

There are few useful tips for collecting and using your business data. 

1. Clarify your question: This is one of the most simple and useful tips.  Find the question that is most important to you that you need your data to answer. This will allow you to concentrate on what is important in your data without everything getting complex and out of focus.

2. Clarify your variables:  After you have figured out what question you need to be answered you will need to decide which variables are important to the question. The importance of this lies in the fact that you will not be collecting useless data or variables and wasting time and money.

3. Quantitative over qualitative: Remember that quantitative data is numerical while qualitative is opinions. Your data should be objective and therefore quantitative rather than qualitative. 

4. Make a plan for your data organization: Before you conduct any experiment it is important to have an organization method that will work well for the experiment. Build an empty spreadsheet and put thought into your headings and how you will organize your data.

5. Do not believe in the average: Averages are great and can be used in many ways, but when it comes to data they can often hide the truth. You need to look at all of the data and toss out the average.

6. Causation vs. correlation: One thing that is very important to remember when you study your variables is that correlation does not always equate to causation. It is important to study and understand the correlations between different variables in order to determine if the correlation actually makes sense.