Data management is the process of creating and enforcing policies, procedures and procedures for handling data throughout its lifecycle. It ensures data is accessible and useful, facilitating 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 pushed to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning and Artificial Intelligence generative (AI) tools to gain advanced insights.
Without a well-defined and standardized data management plan, businesses can end up with uncompatible data silos and inconsistency of data sets that hamper the ability to run business intelligence and analytics applications. A poor data management strategy can reduce the trust of customers and employees.
To overcome these challenges to meet these challenges, it’s crucial that businesses create a data management strategy (DMP) that includes the people and processes needed to manage all kinds of data. A DMP, for example can help researchers decide the conventions for naming files that they should employ to organize data sets to store them long-term and make them simple to access. It may also include the data workflow that outlines the steps needed for cleansing, testing and integrating raw and refined data sets to allow them to be suitable for analysis.
A DMP can be utilized by organizations that collect consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the global and state level, such as the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also aid in the creation of policies and procedures for addressing data security threats and audits.