Data management is the practice of collecting, maintaining, and using data in a secure, efficient, and cost-effective manner. The purpose of data management is to help people, organizations and connected things optimize the use of data within the limits of policies and regulations so that they can make decisions and take action that maximize the benefit to the organization. A robust data management strategy is more and more important than ever, as organizations increasingly rely on intangible assets to create value. To get the most out of your data, it's important to establish data management best practices. The first step is to clearly identify your business objectives.
Then, focus on data quality and enable the right people to access data. Effective data management requires a reliable data strategy and methods to access, integrate, clean, govern, store and prepare data for analysis. In our digital world, data reaches organizations from many sources: operating and transactional systems, scanners, sensors, smart devices, social media, video and text. But the value of the data is not based on its source, quality, or format. Its value depends on what you do with it. Data management is the process by which companies collect, store, access and protect data from various business software solutions.
Using data management enables more efficient access to data analytics that provide the information needed to improve business operations and identify opportunities for improvement. By establishing a better framework for accessing the wide swaths of data generated by each company, companies can make more informed decisions and improve their ability to deliver valuable products and services to their customers. Through government policies, you can define what data users can access, who can change (or view) the data, and how to handle exceptions. Form validation is a clear example of one of those intelligent collection processes which are created to ensure that the data you are collecting is valid. If you run a small business, you can replicate the function of data catalogs by creating an inventory of all the data assets your company has. Good access technology allows you to extract useful data from any type of data storage mechanism or format that is available so you can spend more time using the data rather than just trying to find it.
Executives or team leaders who may need access to more customer data than analysts or sales reps need to have more permissions than those who only need certain types of data. Basically it's like buying different USB flash drives (extremely large USB) where you have space to store a certain volume of data. Think of your governance standards as your standard operating procedures when it comes to data management. In business, data is often associated with customers, leads, employees, suppliers, businesses, accounts, competitors and finance. Proper data management is a critical step in improving the overall health of your data and ensuring that you get the most value from your data. As volumes, types and sources of data increase, the need for real-time data processing increases and the urgency to manage data well remains a top priority for business success.
Each of your applications has a database with particular characteristics and it doesn't always connect natively with your other applications. Developing a data management strategy is essential for companies that want to maintain a competitive advantage and improve the internal and customer-facing elements of business operations. As the number of enterprise software platforms proliferate so does a company's ability to collect data and employ data analysis to gain key insights from it.
