When was the last time you tried to access information and ended up spending an hour looking through multiple systems to find it? Even worse, when was the last time your data failed to give you the right information, at the right time to help you do your job?

In observance of Friendship Day, we would like to point out how the qualities of a lasting friendship have much in common with the effects of well-managed data upon everyday life:

A friend is someone who is there for you when they rather be anywhere else

Just as you expect your good friends to be dependable, reliable data is non-negotiable. It’s table stakes for any company who is looking to be data-driven.

Let’s say you’re an expanding manufacturer with data silos across different organizations. You may need help obtaining a 360° view of your newly acquired customers and product data, for pre-merger analytics, and post-merger integration.

How about a healthcare organization with siloed, duplicated hospital and patient data? You could probably use some support for improving data management efficiencies, and omnichannel engagement with your patients.

You may even be a retailer, unable to provide a unified customer experience. In need of assistance for developing a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. One that helps you create a single, consolidated view of your customers, and uncover important householding information.

These sound like problems only a real friend could understand.

I get by with a little help from my friends

A real friend is always willing to lend a helping hand. Good data behaves similarly by providing you with consistent and contextual information that helps you with your daily activities.

Reltio’s data-driven applications combines reliable data, relevant insights and recommended actions into cloud applications. These enterprise data-driven applications give business users a consumer-grade experience, like LinkedIn, Google and Facebook. 

Tailored to your industry and functional role, these data-driven applications can help you identify and reveal relationships among the people, products, places and activities you care about. They can also guide you with powerful visuals and intelligent recommendations that help you make better decisions as you complete tasks.

Workflow and collaboration capabilities also allow you to manage, curate and provide real-time feedback on data quality. These out-of-the-box workflow processes accept input and requests from business users, without using email. They also improve the accuracy and effectiveness of information through social collaborative voting, ranking and rating.

Everyone is a friend, until they prove otherwise

Your true friends have likely proven themselves to be trustworthy. Putting your data in the cloud involves a high level of trust in your data management provider. 

Companies, like Reltio have gained the trust of their customers, through earning HITRUST CSF Certification status, for information security by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST). 

Furthermore, compliance is maintained with Privacy Shield and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives control back to EU citizens and residents over their personal data.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words

Good friends always provide you with insightful information that you may not have thought of. Reltio’s Commercial Graph is like that. 

Architected for today’s agile enterprise, it is built with a columnar and graph hybrid store to combine, relate and store an infinite number of attributes and relationships. Created for the purpose of delivering any type of data-driven application, for any business need. 

It also handles operational and analytical functions within the same data-driven application. Covering every possible scenario, while giving you the ability to imagine your data from any perspective.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost

The irreplaceable value of a true friend is not always apparent. True friendships, like sound health, need maintenance and continuous improvement to endure. 

Data quality works similarly. One cannot tell whether data is valuable until it is analyzed. Oftentimes, the more maintenance and improvements that are made to the data, the more valuable the insights become.

Rather than mourn over lost opportunities from poor data, make sure your data scientists and analytical platforms have access to reliable data. Reltio Insights enables advanced analytics with machine learning, so that you can access accurate information for faster results.

Unlike analytics-only tools, Reltio’s bidirectional connectors bring aggregated insights back to master data profiles. Offering valuable recommendations for business improvement to the users of data-driven applications. Thereby making your data as reliable, consistent, trustworthy, insightful and valuable as your best friend.