The next step is to identify all the sources of data that are relevant to the business problem at hand. Organizations will have one or more systems, such as HR management systems, accounting systems, and inventory management systems. Depending on the nature of the problem at hand, we may need to fetch the data from multiple sources. Also, data that is obtained through the data acquisition step need not always be structured as tabular data; it could be unstructured data, such as emails, recorded voice files, and images.

In corporate organizations of reasonable size, it may not be possible for an ML professional to work all alone on the task of fetching the data from the diverse range of systems. Tight collaboration with other professionals in the organization may be required to complete this step of the pipeline successfully: