Data management is the process of establishing and enforcing policies, procedures and procedures to manage data throughout its lifecycle. It makes sure that data is available and useful, facilitates the compliance of regulators and makes informed decisions and ultimately gives a competitive advantage for businesses.
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 must be consolidated, and then delivered to business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to provide advanced insights.
Without a clearly defined data management plan, businesses could 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 address these issues businesses must devise an effective data-management plan (DMP), which includes the processes and people needed to handle all kinds of data. A DMP, for example can assist researchers in determining the naming conventions for files that they should utilize to organize data sets in order to store them over the long term and make them easy to access. It can also contain the data workflow that outlines the steps needed for cleansing, testing and integrating raw and refined data sets in order to ensure they are suitable for analysis.
A DMP can be utilized by organizations that collect consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws on look at more info a global and state level, such as the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can also guide the development of procedures and policies to deal with security threats to data and audits.