Data is the driving force behind many industries and is very much an economy-sustaining commodity. However, with increased importance has come the challenge of data management.
For businesses of all sizes, data management has become the cornerstone of successful digital marketing strategies. After all, ensuring you have high quality, relevant and reliable data that provides essential insight into customer behaviour and allows for patterns to be detected in order to create strong marketing campaigns is enough to make or break your business.
But what exactly is data management and how can you implement strategies that help your organisation manage information more effectively? In this blog, we look to answer all of these questions and more.
What is data management?
Simply put, data management is the implementation of company policies and strategies that allow organisations to control the data required for a variety of business needs – from collecting and analysing information to ensuring all data is used in a secure, cost-efficient and effective manner.
Whether you’re a business looking to optimise data for marketing purposes, an individual using data for research, or an organisation using social information for policy and regulation creation, having a strategy in place to ensure data is used in the best way to benefit you and your organisation is essential.
What is data management used for?
An umbrella term used to describe a wide range of processes, data management is used for the following essential business tasks:
- To collate and process data from a range of business-relevant sources, including information collected directly from customers, data taken indirectly from customer profiles, data purchased or shared from third party marketing companies, etc.
- To provide easy access to authorised users. Data can be confusing when presented in a haphazard or unformalised manner. Data management solutions should be used to present data in a user-friendly way and allow authorised users to easily visualise, interpret and use data effectively.
- To store data securely. Personal information that is stored by businesses, such as employee records and bank details, needs to be protected properly. If this data is not secure, it may be stolen or misused by unauthorised third parties or fraudsters through phishing scams and identity theft. Nowadays, the use of professional online clouds and encrypted servers, both those housed internally and those maintained by private data centre facilities, provide common solutions.
- To ensure you remain compliant with data privacy and retention legislation. Along with data protection, how your business deals with data privacy, archive methods and retention lengths are also regulated. Modern data management systems can automatically archive and destroy data correctly, ensuring you remain fully compliant.
Why does data management matter?
As touched upon already when looking at the uses of data management, there are three key reasons why having a good strategy in place really matters:
1. Data is a valuable resource – protect it!
What’s the point in spending time, resources and money collecting data if you don’t have a strategy in place to correctly manage and protect it? Misplacing data is not only a security risk, it’s also just bad business. When you have to spend time collecting useful data, it would be foolish not to have a strategy in place to help you protect, analyse and use it going forward.
2. Too much data can be overwhelming without help
With the sheer amount of data being collected by businesses growing year on year, for many, attempting to collect, store, protect and analyse it without a strategy or a digital solution can seem like an impossible task. Properly implemented data management strategies can help to simplify data management, helping you to stay on top of your tasks and remain fully compliant in the process.
3. Losing personal data could be disastrous
Did you know that, according to the British Chambers of Commerce, 93% of businesses that lose access to their data for 10 days or more due to hacking or negligence file for bankruptcy within one year of the incident? From irreparable reputational damage to regulatory fines, not having a well-thought-out data management strategy in place can cost your business big.
What are data management solutions?
In today’s day and age, when businesses come to think about how to manage their data, they find that best practices typically revolve around using better analytics and specialist software. Known as data management solutions, these smart digital systems provide an efficient way to manage data across a wide spectrum of data tiers and sub-categories.
Unlike traditional methods of data management, which use hard-copy filing systems and require a lot of space, digital solutions are built on virtual platforms and can include spreadsheets, data lakes, data analytics and more. As already mentioned, this allows for important data management tasks such as data collection, storage, protection, analysis and compliance to be managed automatically in a user-friendly and productive manner.
Typically designed by third-party developers and database specialists, commercial data management solutions can also usually be integrated into a business’ existing systems seamlessly, requiring minimal support and maintenance after installation.
At illumo digital, for example, our specialist data management solutions for both public and private sector organisations feature effortless data visualisation and data optimisation options, as well as smart data warehousing and governance capabilities that mean managing your organisation’s data couldn’t be simpler.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help your organisation with data management solutions, contact us today and a consultant will be in touch to discuss your project and explain the services we offer in further detail.
