Extracting value from data with proper data management
There are three elements that characterize big data: Volume, velocity, and variety. Of the three, volume is becoming a greater concern for companies: the amount of data collected is only growing! IT experts constantly have to adopt new terminology to describe the massiveness of data. It is no longer surprising to hear about petabytes, exabytes, or zettabytes…
How to manage the abundant influx of data
This influx of data is flooding businesses. All these information resources are valuable for business–but how do we collect, organize, and store them? The solution to managing a colossal volume of data is data management.
The real challenge of data management is to transform the raw material into useful information for the company – bearing in mind the “garbage in, garbage out” principle: raw data is worthless and will only produce waste if it is not properly cleaned up before being used.
Data management to enhance the value of data
Data management does not stop at managing the volume of data entering the databases. It is also useful for managing the other two V’s: variety and velocity.
Variety: with the multiplication of sources and formats, learning to know, prioritize, and control data flow has become necessary.
Velocity: to fully understand the challenges of velocity, you need to understand the rate of change of the data, i.e. the frequency of creation of new data, the means to store it, the time to process it, the target audience…The three dimensions of data management:
- Technical management
- Controlling the cost of data
- Pedagogy and team support
Be careful not to be satisfied with a posteriori management of incoming data or focus on only one department at a time. It is essential to federate all the technical and business players around a collaborative approach. Why? If all the players contribute to the purification and enrichment of data knowledge, they can take full advantage of it. This is the principle of data management: Transforming data and making it usable by all through a joint effort.
To do this, you can use methods that have already proven their worth: collaborative data mapping, interactivity, and incrementality, as well as the use case approach.
Make data management sustainable
Beyond data knowledge, you have another challenge (and not the least important one) to take up: making your company’s data management sustainable. You must integrate it into everyone’s daily practices!
Setting up data maps to make data management issues permanent is not enough. You need to educate the business units to regularly connect to a data catalog and update the information as soon as necessary.
All this requires good communication and successful change management. Make sure that the businesses understand the approach’s benefits and take ownership of it!
Conclusion
The challenge of data management is to control the high volume of data coming in, but also to study the data to understand it well and to make better use of it. It’s about setting up a system to manage the influx of data as well as possible, transforming it to make it accessible to everyone, and changing the very culture of the company.
Still have questions about data governance? Turn to DataGalaxy to create your company’s data lineage mapping, develop a standardized business glossary, and much more! Check our calendar and select a date that works for you. Jumpstart your free 15-day platform trial access & start making the most of your data today!
