What Is Data Management And Why Is It Important?
It’s safe to say that in the modern digital economy, businesses have more data at their fingertips than ever. Business leaders need data to intelligently make critical business decisions, but they also need data management solutions that promote data visibility and reliability.
As a leader in business intelligence, Sonora & Associates understands that organizations must invest in data management solutions and best practices to improve their efficiency and ultimately create reliable and smarter strategies for growth. To that end, let’s dive into what data management is, the types of data management businesses can use, and why data management is so important.
Defining Data Management
At its core, data management is a method to gather, organize, secure, and store business data that can drive important business decisions. Businesses are building and ingesting data at breakneck speeds, which means data management solutions are a must-have if businesses want to make sense of all the data they consume.
Data management is the basis on which business intelligence that analyzes that data rests. High-quality data management software grants businesses access to reliable data that can drive critical decisions. These software solutions make it easier to prepare data as well as catalog and search through it, which gives data analysts precisely what they need to rapidly locate the data they want to analyze.
Different types of data management
The various types of data management impact different aspects of a business’s data environment.
Each type of data management makes different business functions easier to fulfill. Some of the most important types of data management include:
- Data Cataloging:
Data analysts can use data catalogs to manage an organization’s sets of metadata. With data catalogs, analysts can paint a larger portrait of the data available to them: changes in data locations and quality become easier to summarize and data points become much easier to locate. - Data Preparation:
Data analysts need data preparation to clean sets of raw data and turn them into the appropriate format for analysis. With data preparation, analysts can make corrections to large sets of raw data and even combine data sets that they can analyze at once. - Data Warehousing:
Data analysts can use data warehouses to consolidate multiple sources of data and contend with various types of data that their organization stores. Leaders in business intelligence such as Sonora & Associates use data warehousing to streamline their data analysis process and make data storage more intuitive.
Where Is Data Management Typically Used?
Businesses large and small typically use their sets of digital data across various verticals. Smaller companies, for instance, may host websites from which they collect product and customer data to gather and analyze. Larger enterprises also leverage data management practices to collect, sort through, and store data to put together things such as clearer customer profiles.
Data management is particularly helpful for businesses that have access to large volumes of information. Generally speaking, an organization with lots of data relevant to its business operations can more accurately assess that data: think of the “You might like…” recommendation systems that streaming platforms like Netflix use. Those systems are so helpful to users precisely because of how well consumer data informs them. Before businesses can leverage their data into actionable strategies, though, they need to gather, organize, and analyze their data.
Why Data Management Is So Important for Businesses?
Businesses that want to better analyze data at scale need to adopt data management. Without data management solutions, these businesses have no way to glean critical insights that offer value to their customers and improve their bottom line.
Data management allows employees across an entire business to locate and work with reliable, trusted sources of data that answer their questions and accelerate the rate at which they perform different functions.
The biggest benefits that come with effective data management solutions include:
- Stronger Data Security
Data management solutions such as encryption and authentication tools can protect a business and its employees from data breaches and losses. Stronger data security can help an organization back up its most critical information and make it retrievable in the event its primary source of data is compromised. Strong data security is particularly valuable for businesses that store personally identifiable information, whose storage must adhere to consumer protection regulations. - Better Data Scalability:
Businesses can use data management to more effectively scale their data and data usage. Data management solutions let businesses create repeatable processes with which they can regularly update their metadata and data. Easy-to-execute, repeatable processes let organizations avoid costs that occur due to data duplication, which usually happens when employees repeat their research or run queries multiple times. - Greater Data Visibility:
Data management solutions can improve a business’s visibility of its data assets. Greater visibility into data assets allows an organization’s employees to more quickly and reliably locate the data they need for analysis. Plus, greater data visibility makes it easier for a business to remain better organized and more productive since their employees are better able to find the data they need to more effectively fulfill their functions.
New Roles for Data Analytics
As businesses continue to rely more heavily on making data-driven decisions, they must inevitably ask more of their employees to analyze organizational data. Data management solutions allow a greater number of employees to fulfil data analytics functions and better understand data naming conventions, data structures, and databases. With data management, businesses can cut down on the time it takes to convert data and analyze it, therefore maximizing the potential value that data offers.
As a leader in business intelligence helping organizations modernize their technology to become more competitive, Sonora & Associates understands just how important data management is to scaling your business functions. That’s why we specialize in data-driven digital transformation that lets you better understand how you’re obtaining and using your current data assets.
Interested in how data management solutions can transform the way you interact with your data? Visit our website to learn more about how we’re bridging the gap between business and technology.
