Data management, the newest must-do in business

Posted by Justin Hesser on May 1, 2012

According to Inc. Magazine, "data is the new oil." As business productivity software and custom database solutions become increasingly popular, it's become even more imperative that companies keep up by investing in a custom application software to help hold and organize all the data that's being used.

This goes for all companies, from major corporations to small business and fledgling startups.

Inc. Magazine states that small businesses need to measure everything in order to get the greatest benefit from using data and analytics in business operations. The magazine gives an example from Ampush Media, a major marketing company, measuring the time customers spend between questions on a mortgage site.

"We started to look at the time between steps," said Jesse Pujji, the co-founder and president of the company. "We noticed that for more than 5 percent of visitors, if they hesitated more than two to three milliseconds at a step, we would lose them. We set up the site so that whenever there was that kind of hesitation, it would deliver an inspirational message, such as 'Low rates are just a few clicks away.' That improved conversion rates by 30 to 40 percent."

Although measuring the clicking habits of online shoppers is extremely important for small businesses – even if they do not primarily conduct e-commerce – measuring other aspects of business from inventory to employee payroll is essential to ensure that this raw data can be turned into information and insight on how well the company is functioning.

Companies can achieve this clarity by investing in a custom database software that can accumulate and display this information to fit the business owner's needs and increase business productivity.