What Is Data Management?

When exploring the worlds of PIM, DAM, and MDM, you might start wondering how to manage all data best. Therefore we start with defining data management in the article below!

Explanation And Definition

Data management is receiving increasing interest, but what exactly is data management? The amount of data in and around business operations is increasing, and with it, the need to use it effectively and efficiently. Besides, the better you can use data well, the greater the benefits you can get from it. Also, the result translates, among other things, into lower costs, higher profits, and competitive advantages.

Acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing data is part of an administrative process. Also, its purpose is to ensure data accessibility, reliability, and timeliness for users. Organisations rely heavily on Big Data to inform business decisions and gain insights into customer behaviour, trends, and opportunities. This enables them to create exceptional customer experiences.

Companies turn to data management solutions and platforms to make sense of the vast data that enterprises gather, analyse, and store today. Data management solutions make processing, validation, and other essential functions more straightforward and less time-intensive.

Leading data platforms allow enterprises to leverage Big Data from all data sources in real-time for more effective customer engagement and increased customer lifetime value (CLV). Moreover, data management software is essential to create and consume data at unprecedented rates. Top data management platforms give enterprises and organisations a 360-degree view of their customers and the complete visibility needed to gain deep, critical insights into consumer behaviour that give brands a competitive edge.

What Is Data?

Data are all types of data in and around your organisation that represent facts. Customer data, data from your accounting, information via your website, order data, quotations, product documentation, measurements from your production process, minutes, and much more, everything that, in one way or another, says something about an aspect of your organisation or business process can be considered as data. Data exists in structured and unstructured forms. Structured data is when data is organised, classified, and easily traceable in a database. In addition,  data still ‘hidden’ in files, documents, messages, images, or sounds is called unstructured data.

Purpose Of Data Management

It is about maintaining, updating, managing, and securing data. For this, files are checked for mutations and adjusted if necessary. You enrich the files with new and additional data from external sources. Thanks to links with other external files, keeping the data up to date can increasingly be automated. The purpose of management is to ensure that the data available is complete, reliable, and on time for the execution of business processes and for making the right management decisions. The addition of the term ‘enterprise’ for the term data management (totally abbreviated as EDM) emphasizes that this concerns the management of data of companies and organizations.

Benefits of Management

Reliable data is needed at the right time for the proper execution of business processes and for making sound management decisions. Sometimes legal provisions compel structured data management. However, the reliability and quality of the data cannot be guaranteed if it is not actively maintained. Data then quickly becomes outdated and is then reduced or even completely useless. In addition to topicality, the consistency of data is essential. If data in different databases relate to the same item, this data must be the same in all databases. This prevents mistakes in spelling, for example, company names, person names, or addresses, from being viewed by the different systems as two companies, two contact persons, and two branches, respectively. Generally, the starting point is that organizations with data management achieve many strategic and operational benefits. This results in a more effective and efficient organization, which translates into profitability and competitive advantage.