Types Of Business Data

There are many types of business data, but if you are running a business of your own, you should definitely give special emphasis on the five types of business data explained below. As they say, information is power, and the way to getting more power in the business world is by being able to gather more and more data, to be able to organize them properly, to be able to interpret them, and ultimately to be able to use them for the benefit of our company, or the company you are working for.

To make a long story short, the five important types of business data are: data of identity, descriptive data, data of activity, subjective data, and relationship data. All five types of business data are connected to one another in some way, but especially the first two go hand in hand together. Descriptive data refers to the sum of all information that is available in order to describe an entity; in most cases, it includes demographic info that are given by third-party sources or by the entity itself. The term identity, however, refers to lynch-pin data that allows all types of business data (descriptive, subjective, etc) to be grouped together so that they can be interpreted in a meaningful way, be related to one another, be compared and contrasted to one another; and this, of course, regardless of whether the entity under discussion is a person, a group of people, a corporation or an institution. In other words, this type of data is a unique identifier without which all the rest would rendered useless.

The third type of business data, namely data of activity, refers to all the actions taken by a certain entity. Activity data can be attached to all kinds of entities, but it goes without saying that an actual living person is a far more complicated entity to analyze and place under this category, since there is certain information regarding a person that is either inaccessible or subjective, meaning that it can be interpreted in more than one ways. This gives as the perfect opportunity to consider the category of subjective data, which practically denotes the domain of beliefs and opinions: either the beliefs and opinions of the entity under discussion about other entities; or the beliefs and opinions of other entities about the entity under discussion. Closely related to subjective data are relationship data. Relationship data are essentially data regarding the way one entity relates to other entities, whether that is a direct relationship or an indirect one.

All in all, it may be the case that identity data is what makes the rest of the types of business data comprehensible, but you should not underestimate the importance each one has separately. And while the first brings all types of data together in a sensible way, each one of the other types of business data alone can and should be used to barriers and to highlight the importance of one element over another, since each project has unique characteristics and it demands from you to be able to use the various types of business data both concurrently and each one separately.