The Importance of Data Management

Data management is a method that involves creating and enforcing procedures, policies and processes to handle data throughout its entire lifecycle. It makes sure that data is available and useful, facilitates regulatory compliance and informed decision-making and ultimately creates 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 delivered to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine Surveys on IT Lifecycle learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to provide advanced insights.

Without a clear 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. Unorganized data management can cause a loss of confidence in employees and customers.

To meet these challenges it is crucial that companies create a data management strategy (DMP) that includes the processes and people required to manage all types of data. A DMP can, for instance can help researchers decide the naming conventions for files that they should employ to arrange data sets to store them over the long term and make them easy to access. It may also include a data workflow that defines the steps to cleanse, verifying and integrating raw and refined data sets in order to make them suitable for analysis.

For companies that collect consumer information for their customers, a DMP can assist in ensuring compliance with privacy laws around the world like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or state-level regulations like California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also aid in the development of procedures and policies for addressing data security threats and audits.