Business Analytics - Data Cleaning Process

Business Analytics - Data Cleaning

With reference to organisation; analytical results of data support decision-making in business. Data sources play a vital role for the organisations to make better decisions. There are two main sources of data collection

Internal source
External source

Internal Data

The data which is generated within an organization is called internal data. It is more relevant to access and analyse to find business insights; insights are used in business decisions.

Some of the most commonly used internal data sources are as −

1. Operational Data

Operational data includes day-to-day business operations like sales transactions, customer data, inventory records, and production data.

2. Customer Data

It is one of the most crucial data which collected directly from customers using CRM, feedback forms, surveys, and customer support systems. It is used in data analysis to find customers opinions or sentiments.

3. Employee Data

It includes Human resources data which can further analysed to get employees performance, payroll information, and employee satisfaction.

4. Financial Data

It includes financial data generated through financial systems, such as budgets, profit and loss, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.

5. Marketing Data

It is also considered as internal data collected from marketing campaigns, website analytics, email marketing, and social media channels.

6. Production Data

Production data also collected from internal sources of an organisation like manufacturing processes. It also involves machine performance, production output, and quality control metrics.

External Data

Some of the most commonly used external data sources are as −

1. Public Data

The data which is collected from public platforms like government databases, journals, magazines, industry reports, and newspapers etc. Some common examples of public data are census data, economic indicators, and public health data.

2. Social Media Data

The data available on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This encompasses user-generated content, sentiment analysis, and engagement metrics.

3. Web Scraping

Data extracted from websites using automated scripts like product reviews, competitors data to do comparison and price comparison.

4. IoT Data

Data collected from sensors, smart devices, and wearables, providing real-time data on environmental conditions, usage patterns, and more.

5. Partner Data

Data is shared between business partners, such as suppliers, distributors, or strategic partnerships, to improve mutual understanding of market conditions or client wants.

6. Open data

Open data is freely usable and available to everybody. It might not be very relevant to you, though, whether it's high-level data or substantially summarized and aggregated. Additionally, it might not be in the format you require or it might be really challenging for you to understand. Making the data usable may take a long time to prepare and then utilise it for analysis.

FAQs

1. What is internal source of data?

The data which is generated within an organization is called internal data. Internal source of data is collected from internal departments of an organisation. Some of the common internal sources of data are Customer Data, Employee Data, Financial Data, Marketing Data, and Production Data.

2. What is external source of data?

The data which is collected through outside boundaries of an organisation is known as external data. External data is used by organisations to assess and model economic, political, social, and environmental problems that influence business. Some of the common external sources of data are Public Data, Social Media Data, Web Scraping, IoT Data, and Partner Data.

3. What is a difference between internal source of data and external source of data?

Internal sources of data are the sources which exist within an organisation like its internal departments while external sources of data are the sources which exist outside the organisation.

Different Sources of Data for Data Analysis