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Data, the term, can be a bit overwhelming due to the fact that it could mean different things such as Primary Data, Secondary Data, Internal Data, External Data, Big Data, Alternative Data etc.

Internal and External Data Sources

Internal Data: Data you own, create and control e.g. an organization’s visitors’ record. Examples are the information recorded from bio and contact fill-ins of visitors.

External Data: Data from outside sources. They are publicly available data on electoral statistics, tax records, government data.
Can data be both external and internal? Yes.

Primary and Secondary Data Sources

Primary Data - This is data collected yourself e.g. from an interview. i.e. You create the questions, served it, and collected the answers.

Secondary Data – Data collected from another person or an application run by another person. Your website data was collected by Google Analytics or any other back end tracking system.

Qualities of Data
1. Veracity – Quality or trustworthiness of the data. i.e. How accurate (reliable) is your (collected) data?
2. Value – The worth of extracted data. Data is useless if it cannot be turned into value.
3. Variety – The different types of data we now use exist in the form of text, pictures, GIFs, videos, URLs etc.
4. Volume – Incredible amount of data generated per second.
“Social media is the number one creator of Data Globally” – IBM
5. Velocity – This is the speed at which vast amounts of data are generated and or collected.
A good example is Twitter, an average of 6,000 tweets per second and 500 million per day. That is massive data rate that requires big data technology.
The 4Vs of Big Data: Volume, Veracity, Velocity, Value

Tools for analysing data include Power Bi, SPSS, STATA, Data and information visualization, Tableau, Excel, Google analytics etc

Culled from a research work by Tobi Ibironke.