Data management is the practice of collecting, storing and using data effectively and securely so that data can drive the decision-making process. Effective data management is crucial to companies that want to develop a data culture. It is a component of data maturity.
The process entails various functions, including data governance, that collectively ensure that data in an organization is accurate and accessible.
Why is it important?
Data has increasingly become a sought-after asset that can be used to make more informed decisions and optimize businesses and processes to drive revenue and reduce costs. However, various problems such as multiple sources of truth, inconsistent data, and many data silos affect the quality of data.
These problems can act as obstacles for a company to grow further. This can happen especially with increasing needs for regulatory compliances such as data privacy and protection. A proper data management system can get rid of these issues and boost the organization’s efficiency.
Benefits of data management
A data management system helps in:
- Creating and maintaining data within an organization
- Providing high-quality data availability and recovery
- Ensuring data privacy and security
- Archiving data in accordance with needs
Data management tools and techniques
Businesses can use various tools and technology to manage data. Here are a few:
- Data governance: Data is in abundance and everywhere. But, this does not mean that owning/sharing a large amount of data guarantees success for organizations that wish to drive impact by using data. Here, companies must have a structure in place to manage data if they want to succeed. Data governance helps in this. The process, simply put, is a concept guided by principles and practices ensuring that high-quality data is available within an organization.
- Data modeling: It is a process of conceptualizing data in a visual form and mapping them in accordance with business needs. Users then store the result in a data warehouse. The process involves symbols. flowcharts, or text. It helps in providing a relation between datasets and increases consistency for various things such as naming, semantics, and imposition of rules.
- Data integration: It combines data from different sources into a consolidated and consistent format. Organizations using this process then keep this in a data warehouse. The process usually involves a data source network and a master server. Clients can then access data from the master server.
Best data management practices
One of the best ways to manage data and gain insights is by asking the real business question. Then, relevant data needed to answer the question can be collected. With this done, organizations can employ tools and techniques of the data management system.
This will allow imbibing a culture of data, which helps organizations to gain insights using data and make better decisions.
