September - 2013 - issue > CEO Spotlight

The Four C's for the "Right Data"

Prakash Nanduri

CEO-Paxata

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Forward

Paxata, a stealth mode startup headquartered in Redwood City, CA, builds enterprise software by leveraging social and consumer technologies in the space of big data.

Right data is the data that helps answer your business questions. Business teams should start by making sure they know what sorts of questions they want to ask. For example, "is there a segment of my customer base that is spending more with my competitors?" With that in mind, you can start to zoom in on the right data.

As you do, I would suggest that you ensure your data be COMPLETE, CONTEXTUAL, CONSUMABLE, and CLEAN. Here is a quick explanation of what I mean:

Complete: this means you have all the data required to answer your question. Getting back to our example, we would need to combine our customer-spend data (how much do they buy from us) with third party data about what customers spend overall (what is their total wallet share). With this comprehensive view, we can determine how much of the market we are truly capturing.