The Importance of Data Management

Data management is the process of creating and enforcing processes, policies and procedures for handling data throughout its entire lifecycle. It makes sure that data is available and useful, facilitating regulatory compliance and informed decision-making, and ultimately provides businesses with an edge in the market.

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 leads to a plethora of data that must be consolidated, and delivered to business analytics (BI) systems as well as enterprise resource management (ERP) platforms, and the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors,, machine learning and generative artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, to provide advanced insights.

Without a clearly defined data management plan, businesses can end up with silos that are not compatible and inconsistent, which hinder the ability to run analytics and business intelligence applications. Inadequate data management can erode employee and customer trust.

To tackle these issues to meet these challenges, it’s crucial that businesses develop a data management plan (DMP) that includes the necessary people and processes to manage all kinds of data. A DMP can, for instance can help researchers decide the conventions for naming files that they should employ to organize data sets to store them over the long term and make them easy to access. It could also include a data workflow that defines the steps to cleanse, 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 consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the global and state scale, such as the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also help guide the development of policies and procedures to deal with security go to the website threats to data and audits.