Data management is the process of creating and enforcing processes, policies and procedures for handling data throughout its entire lifecycle. It ensures that data is easily accessible and useful, facilitates regulatory compliance and informed decision-making 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. The result is a growing amount of data that must be consolidated and sent to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning and Artificial Intelligence generative (AI) tools to provide advanced insights.
Without a well-defined and standardized data management strategy, businesses could end up with incompatible data silos and data sets that are inconsistent which make it difficult to run business intelligence and analytics applications. Data management issues can erode employee and customer trust.
To meet these challenges businesses must create an effective data-management plan (DMP) which includes the people and processes required to manage all types data. A DMP, for example, can help researchers determine the file naming conventions that they should follow to organize data sets in order to keep them for a long time and make them easy to access. It can also include a data workflow that defines the steps for cleansing, checking and integrating raw as well as refined data sets to allow them to be suitable for analysis.
A DMP can be used by companies that collect customer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the global and state level, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can be used to guide the development and implementation of procedures and policies which address threats to data security.
