Where is the Data?
It always helps to know where you are going before you start a trip. Unless you are just going for a ‘walk-about’ or wandering for the sake of wandering. For those seeking to forecast their cash flows, one starts with the outcome they seek (perhaps a detailed 90 day daily cash forecast of all cash flows, with variance analysis capabilities, etc.). As soon as the desired outcome is determined for a forecast, a number of questions about data usually emerge that must be answered. In many instances, treasury professionals have these four questions:
- What data do we need? This is best answered on a custom basis for each individual firm.
- Where is the data?
- How can I get at the data that exists inside our company?
- How can I get at the data that resides beyond our company servers or databases?
This short blog entry is focused on the 2nd question. Where is the data?
“In theory, reality is just like theory.
In reality, theory is nothing like reality.” source unknown
Determining what data you need and where it is most appropriately found is, in theory, quite a simple thing. However, serious analysis and discovery must be made when determining the location of the data that is needed. Questions such as the following can help you create your information inventory list.
- How frequently will I need this data? If there are options, what is the best source for that data given this frequency?
- What level of data will I need? Summary, detailed? Do I need to be able to drill down into it for research purposes?
- Given various options, which data is more accurate most of the time?
- Does some of this data sits ‘off the grid’ that I need to access or receive?
- Location of data? What sits inside Treasury, what is in the organization in another business area, what is on a spreadsheet? Is it is housed in a SaaS system or stored in locations outside our data center? Finding the location of the data includes the path to the server, the database and the specific table(s) that are necessary.
- Data needed that doesn’t exist. Some data that is needed for forecasting needs to be created. This can range from creating relational tables (on drives or in memory) from multiple sources for the forecast or analysis to creating databases for hierarchies or associative tables for a variety of reasons.
Once the location of the data is filled out on your information inventory list, you are now able to begin the process of getting the data or securing access to that data and determining what the format, shape and quality it is in – and what needs to be done to it.
/caj
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