Real-time dashboards. Real-time data collection. Real-time alerts and reporting.
If data can help us make better decisions, then does real-time data help us even more than data collected less frequently?
The short answer: I think it only makes sense to collect it in real-time if you are able to act upon it in near-real time.
My longer answer:
How often you refresh data has some impacts to consider.
Real-time data has the benefit of giving you the most up-do-date information available.
The impact of this is that you will need to transmit and store a lot more data.
You may end up dealing with orders of magnitude bigger data-sets that require different infrastructure to manage and different tools to analyse.
More frequent data can add a lot of noise, so it’s not always giving you a clearer picture for making decisions.
My rule of thumb is to match the cadence of data collection with the time-frame you are able to act upon it.
If you can act immediately, then real-time data is good.
If you will only make a decision in 3 months time, then quarterly data collection is probably ok.
And if things are very volatile, then real-time data might hamper your ability to make a decision. Rather smooth it out by collecting fewer datapoints and use rolling-averages.
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