What is Data Management and Why is it Important for Your Business?

Without a doubt, data is the lifeblood of any organization. From company data to customers and partners/vendors. A badly structured data management could result in all sorts of headaches for your company;

• Compliance violations, resulting in lawsuits.
• Data breach
• Reputation ruin
• Making critical company decisions based on guesswork and gut instinct, which results in inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and ultimately, a decline in profitability.

The list is endless.

But primarily, we must understand the basics;

What is Data management?

Imagine trying to run a bake sale without a recipe or an ingredient list. You’re probably thinking “Well, that doesn’t make any sense”. That's what businesses face when they don't manage their data properly. Data management isn't just fancy business terminology; it's about collecting, organizing, and using information like a pro – to achieve a particular goal, say; profitability, inventory management, employee role assignments, company acquisitions and procurements, project management… the list is endless.

Why's it So Important?

Think of data as your second conscience or better yet, your business's whisperer. Whenever you want to make a decision, it informs you with accurate information. It tells you what your customers like, what sells well so you can double down, and where things might be going wrong.

Now imagine when it’s all scattered and messy. Making sense of all those whispers becomes impossible.

Data management helps you:

• Find what you’re looking for easily—no more scrambling for urgent information.
• Be more confident while making decisions, because you have a solid backing (data).
• Keep your sensitive data secure in an enclosed system.
• Avoid regulatory issues
• Scale easily and serve more customers without getting overwhelmed.

Quite frankly data management sounds a bit dry, but changing your perception of it from “something they say is important” to “a goldmine of usable information” is a secret ingredient for a successful business.

Because It helps you make smart decisions, protect your valuable information, and grow in any direction you want—you need only use the data that’s already there.

Like any good recipe, data management needs constant attention and care to utilize it effectively.

What is the goal of data management?

The goal of data management is to help individuals, groups, and connected systems maximise the use of data while simultaneously adhering to legal and regulatory requirements. This allows stakeholders to make choices and take actions to the benefit of the company.

What are the types of data management?

Data management plays several roles in an organization, making certain functions easier and less time-consuming. These data management techniques include the following:

• Data preparation: To prepare raw data for analysis, it must be cleaned, formatted, and corrected. It may also involve merging different data sets.
• Data pipelines: Enables the automated flow of data from one system to another.
• ETLs (Extract, Transform, Load): These are built to extract data from one system, transform it, and load it into the organization’s data warehouse.
• Data catalogs: Makes finding and understanding your data a whole lot easier, while providing a summary of its changes, locations, and quality.
• Data warehouses serve as centralized hubs where many data sources converge, accommodating all data types stored by your business while offering a structured pathway for data analysis.
• Data architecture offers a systematic methodology for designing and overseeing the flow of data, ensuring its efficient management and utilization.

What are examples of data management?

1. Data privacy and security

The goal of data security is to protect your information from breaches, theft, and unauthorized access. It is often the obligation of the IT department that the database management system is kept secure.

2. Data governance

Data governance is a set of principles, standards, and practices that ensure your organization’s data is reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. It could also be viewed as the availability, quality, and security of your organization’s data through various policies and standards.

These processes determine who is assigned what data, security measures put on certain data, and intended uses for it. However, the overarching goal is to maintain high-quality data that is both secure and easily accessible for business use.

3. Data integration

This process enables your business to combine and harmonize data from various sources into a unified, coherent format. Essentially, it brings together data from diverse sources, providing a holistic view of your business performance.

Additionally, it helps in;

• Master Data Management: Integration supports accurate, well-connected master data, essential for sustainability and decision-making.
• Data Migration: Whenever you decide to adopt new systems or environments, data integration ensures you have a smooth transition.

4. Data modeling

Think of it like creating a roadmap or architect’s blueprint. This time for data management. It ensures your data is organized, accessible, and aligned with your business goals. It involves creating a visual representation of your entire information system—or specific parts of it.

The goal is to illustrate connections between data points, structures, and relationships.

It provides a way to understand the types of data used and stored within a system, how data can be grouped and organized, and its formats and attributes.

To make things easier, data modeling ensures a consistent and predictable way of managing data resources across your organization.

5. Data storage

Data storage plays a crucial role in modern businesses, in the following ways:

1. Cost Efficiency:

Cloud storage offers an attractive alternative to physical servers and portable hard drives by allowing businesses to rent storage space from third-party providers at a significantly lower cost.

2. Accessibility:

In our present fast-paced world, having data readily available is essential for efficient business operations and decision-making. Cloud storage offers you that.

3. Reduced Risk of Data Loss:

With regular backups and redundancy strategies, cloud storage minimizes the chances of data loss compared to relying solely on physical storage devices.

4. Efficiency and Productivity:

With Predictable costs and easy management, cloud storage allows you to focus on your core business activities, instead of constant hardware challenges.

Why Is Data Management Important?

To achieve effective data analysis at scale, gain applicable insights that add value to your business, customers, and improve your bottom line, you must have a great data management system.

Some benefits of an effective data management solution include:

Visibility

Good data management makes it clear and easy for employees to quickly and confidently find the right data for their analysis, gain fast access to company data assets… everything they need to do their jobs better, reduce redundancies and boost productivity and results. Essentially, data visibility allows your company to be more organized and productive.

Reliability

Eliminate the tedious process of scrambling for accurate info. Your data management system sets clear rules and keeps your data fresh, so everyone trusts the numbers they're using.

This lets you react faster to;

• Market shifts,
• Customer demands,
• Business demands.

Keeping you ahead of the curve.

Security

Data breaches are a nightmare. Thankfully great data management throws up shields of encryption and safeguards to keep your information safe. This means your company's secrets are protected, even if something goes wrong. Plus, it helps you follow those important privacy laws that keep customers happy and your business from being sued.

Find out more about InfoLobby’s secure cloud-based data management system

Scalability

When processes are easy to repeat, your organization can avoid the unnecessary costs of duplication, such as employees conducting the same research over and over again or re-running costly queries unnecessarily.

Data management allows you to effectively scale data and usage occasions with repeatable processes to keep your data and metadata up to date. 

So, regardless of whether you’re looking to scale up or strategically scale down your business, your data management system will play a huge role in whether it’s a smooth transition for your company or an endless nightmare.

How to Manage Your Data Securely in InfoLobby

Much like SAPs are for large enterprises, InfoLobby offers you a platform that easily adapts to all your business process needs. The ones that don’t, you can easily create.

Its functions include, but aren’t limited to;

• CRM functions
• Project management functions
• Workflow management system
• Business process automation, and so on.

All for a ridiculously cheap price. 

Click here to find out how you can achieve maximum business performance without breaking the bank.