Data management is crucial to the success of any company. It’s also vital to ensure the integrity and trust of data which can lead to greater productivity, efficiency, and profit.
Data management is about establishing a consistent method of gathering, storing and organizing data, including metadata definition as well as risk profiling, cleaning up the data, ensuring it’s maintained, and safeguarding it. It’s about making sure that the right people can access the correct data at the right time, without breaking privacy laws or other regulations. It’s about ensuring that the data is appropriate for the purpose in all departments and applications, regardless of whether it’s from web services or batch, real-time, or sensor/IoT-related workloads. It’s about keeping data safe and safe from breaches and facilitating auditing and compliance functions.
The first step to effective data management is to get a clear understanding of the data that is crucial to your department. It is a good idea to gather input from people throughout the company who understand the data departments use and the reasons behind it. This can help you develop a plan to calculate the data usage estimates, establish accessibility guidelines, define approaches for archiving data and assign ownership and management, among other things.
The next step is to make it a point to ensure that all systems that hold business data are in sync and share data. This can prevent redundancies, which could result in duplicate metrics being pulled from the same data set. This can also help prevent from inconsistencies that could occur when data is stored in different systems (point of sale, manufacturing and inventory, for instance). Be sure that you have processes that can be used to control this.