Events to Remember
Every day, in just about every organization around the world, people are coming to work and performing tasks as part of their jobs, which comprise the processes that drive success. Whether it’s stocking shelves, or selling cars, or interviewing potential employees, or slicing, weighing and packaging deli meat, each of those business processes contributes data to the overall understanding of the business’s operations and success.
Of course, if you talk to the folks that drive your business, as we’ve suggested previously, you’re likely to find that internal processes like that aren’t the only influences on the behavior of your customers, your employees, or your success. Indeed, there are lots of external influences that bombard your business on a daily basis that can have effects large or small on how things operate - sometimes for an hour, sometimes for weeks.
Sometimes those external forces are natural, like the weather - whenever it snows, perhaps your business experiences a surge in activity. Or perhaps sales dip. When it’s an unseasonably warm day, do your stores experience heavier traffic than most other days? Maybe the full moon really does have an impact. And the earthquake the rattled windows or the wildfire that scorched homes will have implications for weeks or months.
Other forces are certainly man-made. Is the Big Game taking place this weekend? Or maybe not the Big Game but a locally important contest? Is a Presidential candidate in town? Is there a parade? A festival? A graduation ceremony? What did the stock market do? Maybe there is a big television event in the middle of the day - or happening later in the evening - that people are watching, or getting ready to watch. How can those things impact your business?
Tracking these sorts of external events and tying them to your organization’s success is challenging, but important. There’s a need to identify potentially impactful events in the first place, from a broad range of possible categories, some of which I’ve mentioned above. Then there’s the challenge of describing them appropriately in ways that allow them to be incorporated into predictive models: when did it happen? how long did it last? where was its location, or its epicenter? what was its furthest range of impact? how many people were involved?
Increasingly there are companies in the industry that offer clean, standardized, and comprehensive sets of data that seek to answer these types of questions. Depending on your needs, such offerings might be the right solution. However, there are some data that are readily available from government or other public sources that you can begin to incorporate manually - weather data from NOAA, for example - to start improving your predictive models right away.
It’s tempting to see our businesses as closed systems where our marketing, our processes, our teams and our customers are the only inputs to the calculation; however, the truth is much more complex and our businesses are impacted by forces beyond our control. Understanding them and modeling them into our data environment will help us to make better choices in the future.