The Importance of Data Management

Data management is a process that involves establishing and enforcing processes, policies and procedures to manage data throughout its entire lifecycle. It ensures data is accessible and useful, facilitates the compliance of regulators and makes informed decisions and ultimately gives 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 proliferation of data that needs to be consolidated and pushed 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 a clearly defined data management strategy, companies may end up with data silos that are not compatible and inconsistent data sets which hinder the ability to run analytics and business intelligence applications. Unorganized data management can cause a loss of confidence in employees and customers.

To tackle these issues it is crucial that companies develop a data management plan (DMP) that includes the people and processes needed to manage all types of data. A DMP can, for instance can assist researchers in determining the conventions for naming files that they should follow to arrange data sets to store them over the long term and make them easy to access. It can also include an information workflow that outlines the steps needed for cleansing, validating and integrating raw and refined data sets to make them suitable for analysis.

For businesses that collect consumer information, a DMP can help ensure compliance with global privacy laws 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 formulation of policies and procedures for addressing data security threats and audits.

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