Data management is a process that involves the creation and enforcement of procedures, policies and processes to handle data throughout its entire lifecycle. It ensures that data is easily accessible and useful, which facilitates regulatory compliance and informed decision-making and ultimately creates businesses with an edge in the market.
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 flood of data that needs to be consolidated, and then delivered to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems Surveys on IT Lifecycle as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning and Artificial Intelligence generative (AI) tools for advanced insights.
Without a clear data management plan, businesses can end up with data silos that are incompatible and inconsistent data sets that hinder the ability to run business intelligence and analytics applications. Poor data management can also affect the confidence of employees and customers.
To meet these challenges It is essential that businesses come up with a data management plan (DMP) that includes the processes and people required to manage all types of data. A DMP, for example, can help researchers determine the conventions for naming files that they should use to organize data sets in order to preserve them over time and make them simple to access. It can also include an information workflow that outlines the steps for cleansing, testing and integrating raw and refined data sets in order to make them suitable for analysis.
For organizations that collect consumer information, a DMP can assist in ensuring compliance with global privacy laws such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or state-level laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It also can guide the development of policies and procedures to deal with security threats to data and audits.
