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 life cycle. It ensures that data is useful and easily accessible, facilitates regulatory compliance, and facilitates informed decisions.

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 proliferation of data that must be consolidated and sent to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to provide advanced insights.

Without look at more info a clear data management strategy, companies can end up with uncompatible data silos and inconsistency of data sets which hinder the ability to run analytics and business intelligence applications. Unorganized data management can affect the confidence of employees and customers.

To meet these challenges, companies must develop a data-management plan (DMP) that includes the people and processes needed to manage all kinds of data. A DMP, for example, can help researchers determine the conventions for naming files that they should employ to arrange data sets to store them over the long term and make them simple to access. It can also contain an information workflow that outlines the steps involved in cleansing, checking and integrating raw as well as refined data sets in order to allow them to be suitable for analysis.

A DMP can be used by companies that collect customer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the state and global level, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also help guide the development of procedures and policies to address security threats to data and audits.