What Is Data Management?

When exploring the worlds of PIM, DAM and MDM you might very well start wondering how you can best manage all data. 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. The better you are able to use data in a good way, the greater the benefits you can get with it. The result translates, among other things, into lower costs, higher profits, and competitive advantages.

It is an administrative process that includes acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing required data to ensure the accessibility, reliability, and timeliness of the data for its users. Organizations and enterprises are making use of Big Data more than ever before to inform business decisions and gain deep insights into customer behavior, trends, and opportunities for creating extraordinary customer experiences.

To make sense of the vast quantities of data that enterprises are gathering, analyzing, and storing today, companies turn to data management solutions and platforms. Data management solutions make processing, validation, and other essential functions simpler and less time-intensive.

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

What Is Data?

Data are all types of data in and around your organization 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 organization or business process can be considered as data. Data exists in structured and unstructured forms. Structured data is when data is organized, classified, and easily traceable in a database. Data that is still ‘hidden’ in files, documents, messages, images, or sound is referred to as unstructured data.

Purpose Of Data Management

Data management 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 good 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 important. If data in different databases relate to the same item, it is important that this data is the same in all databases. This prevents mistakes in the spelling of, 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. In general, the starting point is that organizations that have their data management in order, achieve many strategic and operational benefits. This results in a more effective and efficient organization, which also translates into profitability and competitive advantage.