Swimming in a sea of data? Effective data management can be your life vest. But first, you need to navigate the murky waters: where’s your data, who’s using it, and how can you harness its power? Our Data Intelligence expert here at Simoda, Tim Latham, and Charlie McCormack, provide a guide to effective data management for your business and what challenges it can help solve.
What is data management?
Data management is the systematic practice of collecting, organising and maintaining data to facilitate productivity, efficiency, and informed decision-making. Organisations are generating and consuming data at unprecedented rates and having a good data management process ensures that this data is easy to access, readily available and accurate.
Types of data management
Data management fulfils various roles within an organisation’s data environment, streamlining essential functions and reducing the time required for these critical processes. Key data management techniques include the following:
Data security safeguards data from unauthorised access or modification, using measures like encryption and anonymisation. It ensures data integrity and confidentiality.
Data warehouses store vast data volumes from various sources, aiding easy access, analysis, and interpretation. They serve as central repositories, consolidating diverse data for streamlined analysis.
Data governance establishes standards, processes, and policies ensuring data security and integrity. It formulates rules for data use, playing a crucial role in compliance with data privacy regulations.
A data pipeline is an automated system that efficiently transfers and processes data between sources and storage, enabling functions such as data cleansing, integration, and real-time event processing.
ETL extracts, transforms, and loads data from diverse sources into a target system, streamlining data movement and transformation for enhanced organisational insights.
“Organisations are generating and consuming data at unprecedented rates and having a good data management process ensures that this data is easy to access, readily available and accurate.”
Data modelling documents data flow in an application or organisation, creating models to represent data sets and relationships. This enhances data professionals’ comprehension of the data structure for effective analysis and reporting.
Data Preparation is used to cleanse and reshape raw data, ensuring it is in the appropriate format for analysis. This process includes making corrections and merging data sets as necessary.Bottom of Form
Why is it important?
Your data can be a great asset to your business if used correctly. When stored and managed well, you can make data-driven decisions, refine marketing efforts and optimise your operations. Also, data management is key as regulatory compliance becomes more important due to the volume and variety of data being generated.
Some of the benefits of having a robust data management solution include, but not limited to:
- Data-backed decisions, enabling your business to make quicker and more informed business decisions.
- Time saving, being able to quickly access, analyse and act upon data.
- Minimise errors by establishing processes and enable yourself to respond effectively to your customers’ needs with up-to-date data.
- Regulatory Compliance and Security by safeguarding against legal issues and protecting your organisation from data losses, thefts and breaches.
At Simoda, we work with businesses that are all facing different issues when it comes to managing their data. It is only going to become more important for businesses moving forward, but before looking at data management solutions, it is important to identify what challenges you are facing so an expert can find the right solution for you.
