Data management is a procedure which involves the creation and implementation of policies, procedures and processes to handle data throughout its entire life cycle. It ensures that data is easily accessible and useful, facilitates regulatory compliance and informed decision-making and ultimately gives 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 leads to a plethora of data which must be consolidated and sent to business analytics (BI) systems as well as enterprise resource management (ERP) platforms as well as the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, and machine learning, as well as generative artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, for advanced insights.
Without a clear data management strategy, companies could end up with data silos that are incompatible and inconsistent data sets which hinder the ability to manage business intelligence and analytics applications. Poor data management can also affect the confidence of employees and customers.
To tackle these issues, it’s essential that companies develop a data management plan (DMP) that includes the necessary people and processes to manage all kinds of data. A DMP, for example will help researchers identify the appropriate file name conventions they should employ to organize data sets in order to store them long-term and make them simple to access. It may also include data workflows that outline the steps that must be followed to cleanse, validate and integrating raw data sets as well as refined data sets in order to make them suitable for analyses.
A DMP can be utilized by companies that collect consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the state and global scale, such as 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 to address security threats to data.