COVID has changed a lot about the way we go through the world and navigate even simple, mundane tasks. No matter how someone feels about all the different things that have gotten wrapped up in the virus, things like masks, lockdowns, vaccines, its origins and so on, the fact is, the effects have been immense. Truth be told, the full effect of the shifts in the economy, distribution networks, and how and where we get our work done won’t be known, much less understood for years to come.
One thing we do know is that people’s habits have changed immensely in the last year. While at one time only a relative handful of people were doing curbside pickup or home delivery, now, almost everyone has done that at least once. Things that we never thought we would buy online are now in our cart and at our doorstep before we even think about going to an actual store for them.
That means all the information that companies had on us as a society pre-COVID has virtually no descriptive power for what we are doing now. Such information is now a historical curiosity rather than something that could be a guide for what people will generally be doing this summer. Realizing this, companies are looking to recalibrate how they get their data and how they analyze it.
One significant element getting a fresh look is of course data management. Many companies do a bang up job of collecting tons of data. The problem lies not in whether they are collecting it, but in what they do with it. All too often, data sits in different servers and split up between different departments, siloed, making cross referencing the data difficult. How much time and energy gets wasted because different departments in a company can’t look at each other’s data? Or what about different companies under a larger, umbrella company? They are probably each gathering all their down data, duplicating a ton of effort that could be better spent elsewhere. This is exacerbated by the rush to gather new data to capture all those changed behaviors.
In managing it, they also clearly need to secure that data a lot better. There are simply too many data breaches to justify any level of complacency. Especially since that data doesn’t really belong to the companies collecting it. The individuals who generated that data are the ones who own it. At best, these companies might look at it as being on loan to them. As such, they have to take better care of it than if it were truly theirs.
That’s what we do at TARTLE, we understand that when someone stores their data with us, we are acting as stewards of that data. We keep it secure and don’t just share it with anyone. The only person who shares the data is you, no one else. What do you think we are? A bank loaning out your money to people without you knowing about it?
What is also apparent is that the first problem, the hoarding of data, leads to the attitude on the part of a company that they are the ones who own the data. With server racks full of it, the temptation definitely arises to find ways to monetize it, first to make enough to pay for the servers themselves and then the question becomes ‘why not more’?
What if there were a way to get the data you need without hoarding it? What if you could get it straight from the source, the individuals generating it? What if you did it with their consent? You don’t have to just store it in racks, you can get exactly the data you want, when you want it, avoiding all the extraneous noise, and so save yourself a lot of the costs of data hoarding as well. You can get all of that with TARTLE. Sign up and get the data you need when you need to do the analysis you need now. Then, if you want, you can sell the analysis if it is beneficial to someone else. That helps create a system that works not just for a few but for everyone.
What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.
