The Importance of Data Management
Data management is the process of creating and enforcing policies, processes and procedures for handling data throughout its lifecycle. It ensures data is accessible and useful, assists in the compliance of regulators and makes informed decisions, and ultimately provides a competitive advantage for businesses.
The importance of effective data management has grown significantly as organizations automate their business processes, leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and deploy data warehouses, among other initiatives. This results in a plethora of data that needs to be consolidated, and then delivered to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for advanced insights.
Without a clear data management plan, businesses could end up with data silos that are incompatible and inconsistent, which hinder the ability to run business intelligence and analytics applications. Unorganized data management can affect the confidence of employees and customers.
To tackle these issues to meet these challenges, it’s crucial that businesses create a data management strategy (DMP) that includes the people and processes required to manage all types of data. For instance an DMP can help researchers determine the file naming conventions they should apply to organize data sets for long-term storage and easy access. It could also include data workflows that specify the steps to be taken to cleanse, validate, and integrating raw data sets and refined data sets in order to ensure that they are suitable for analysis.
For companies that gather consumer information A DMP can assist in ensuring compliance with global privacy laws such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or state-level regulations, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also be used to guide the creation and implementation of procedures and policies which address threats to data security.