There are four types of data in your company (and only one is in your data lake)

When we talk to people about using ALL of their data to find actionable insights, we often hear: “We’ve got it all in our data lake.” That’s when we gently break the news to them that it’s not ALL in there.

The truth is that there are four different types of data in every company, and only one of them is in the data lake. The other three types are equally important, but are frequently overlooked and undervalued. 

Internal + Managed Data

This is your data lake. This is all of the data organized and managed by your data team. Things like product data, customer records and sales data typically fall into this category. It is often the most universally known and understood data in the company. It is also often the only data the analysts and data scientists are looking at. 

External + Managed Data

This is structured, organized data contained in external systems. Think of advertising platforms like Google or Facebook, or SaaS services like Salesforce or Zendesk. This data can be robust and complex. Often it is used by a smaller subset of departments or roles in the company. There are ways to pull it out, but typically it is only used on-platform.

Internal + Unmanaged  Data

This is data that lives in spreadsheets, documents or email folders (or even in people’s heads). It may be used by just one person or by groups with shared access, but beyond these few people, others in the company don’t even know it exists. This data may be things like historical pricing and promotion data, deal terms, or product metadata. In many cases, the same data may be recreated several times by different people (think of the wasted effort!) who don’t know that someone else already has it. 

External + Unmanaged Data

This is valuable, useful data that exists outside the company in an unstructured way. It could be things like competitors’ pricing, press coverage statistics or address information of potential retail distribution. Individuals in the company may gather it on a project by project basis, but even when they do, it is often incomplete and buried in a single-use project. 

Organizations have become relatively good at using the first kind of data, but the other three kinds of data have massive untapped potential. In many cases, the hard work of gathering and organizing the data has already been done, but it isn’t being shared or communicated effectively. If you aren’t mapping and maximizing your use of all four types of data, you are leaving too much value on the table.