Improper data management could lead to poor decision-making, inefficient processes, security breaches, or even costly privacy compliance violations. To ensure the accuracy and quality of your data as it flows throughout your business, you need a well-coordinated data management strategy.
Coordinating Data: Tips and Best Practices
The following best practices will help you implement the systems, processes, and support needed to ensure proper data coordination.
Assess Your Data Management Maturity
First, you need to assess the effectiveness of your current data management practices and figure out where you need to improve to reach your goals. It may be helpful to use a data management maturity model (DMMM), a set of guidelines for developing, improving, and assessing your data management systems.
For example, the DAMA-DMBOK (Data Management Body of Knowledge) provides a popular and comprehensive maturity model developed by a community of established data management experts.
Evaluate Your Data Quality
One factor to consider when assessing your data management maturity is the overall quality of your data. Data quality refers to things like:
- Consistency – Does the data in location A match up with the data in location B?
- Accuracy – Does the data contain the correct information?
- Completeness – Is there any information missing from the data?
- Uniqueness – Are there many redundant files or database entries?
- Timeliness – Is the information up-to-date?
- Conformity – Is the data in the proper format for the system or application?
Evaluating the quality of your data will help you identify the weaknesses in current data management practices, making it easier to implement the necessary improvements.
Establish Better Business Processes
Assessing your data management maturity will likely reveal inefficiencies and bad practices in how your business handles data. You then can create new procedures that address all of these issues.
It’s important to establish processes that help you achieve your data management goals. However, you should be realistic about how the changes may affect people working daily with the data and plan to teach your business resources how best to use data.
Consider Your Data Storage Options
There are several different options for data storage, depending on how much and what kinds of data you process and what you’re using that data for. For example, traditional relational databases or file-based storage systems are relatively simple solutions that work well for smaller businesses.
The next step is a data warehouse, which can store and organize much more extensive data. Data warehouses work well for medium and large businesses that need to process, share, and analyze data across multiple teams or applications.
The key is to choose a solution that integrates with your existing business systems, provides the features needed to reach your data management maturity goals, and follows all the necessary security and privacy guidelines to protect your data.
Find The Right Software
Coordinating data across various applications and locations requires the right software. Data management software can be used to tackle many tasks, including:
- Data integration
- Data transformation
- Data profiling
- Data delivery
- Data pipeline monitoring
- Data backup
There are a few factors to consider as you shop for data management software. Some solutions are complicated to configure and operate, making them a bad fit for smaller organizations without a dedicated data team. On the other hand, no-code data management solutions are much easier to use but may only provide some of the features and support you need to accomplish your goals.
Coordinating data across all the teams, applications, and sites that make up a modern business can be very complicated. The master data management experts at Meet Me In The Cloud can partner with your organization to develop a customized strategy that helps you harness your valuable data.
Meet Me In The Cloud can turn your digital collaboration tools into productivity engines. At any point in your collaboration journey, we partner with you to fully adopt your preferred technology tools. To get started, contact our experts today. 1-866-221-3221
