Effective Data Management: 5 tips for doing it like a pro
Hi, my name is Joanna Dobrzyńska and I work as a Business Consultant at Comarch. Today we’ll talk about effective data management. Here are 5 simple steps to improve this area in your organization.
Business goals
First of all – outline your business goals. Which means, start small by establishing objectives that you want to achieve with data. Define the scope and type of data you’re going to work with. Your targets might be:
- Creating or improving automations of processes;
- Reducing time-to-market;
- Monitoring data exchange with your partners;
- Reducing data sources etc.
Actually, many companies continue to store way too much data for which they have absolutely no use. This is a very ineffective business practice. And only by keeping the data your company can benefit from, you’ll on a good way to efficiently manage your data.
Data quality
The second step is about focusing on data quality, which basically leads to data audit and compliance. Data protection and security need to be a number one priority when it comes to your business’s data management. At the beginning, you should check your data accuracy and compliance. Using proper data management software can help ensure the safety and compliance with GDPR or other regulations.
Building a piece of good data set cannot be accomplished without putting data through the process of fixing or removing incorrect, duplicated or incomplete information. Reality shows that many times data comes from multiple sources, which increases the risk of having it duplicated or mislabelled.
Data accuracy
The third step is – ensure the data is checked and cleaned before it is used in any analytics or reporting to improve the accuracy of all metrics pulled from your data. Making data quality a top priority and closely following security rules help to keep all aspects of your company’s data use clean and reliable.
All these processes can be done manually using Excel or other tools you are currently using. However, you don’t have to waste time over this as there are many ready-to-use solutions on the market that can help you with data audit and validation.
Simplified access
The forth step is – ensure your data is easily accessible to all departments that use it on a daily basis. It seems very obvious at first glance, but who of us has not been in a situation where we needed to check or analyse something without having an access to a folder or database?
Data management software
Finally, the last step – use quality data management software that will be the single source of truth for your organization and business partners. Finding reliable tools is an essential step in creating quality data management process for your company. Lack of access to data steals time, lowers the value of performed analytics and disrupts daily existence of your organization.
Nowadays, when companies process tons of data daily, technology meets their expectations and offers solutions that meet the points listed today. A widely available range of software can check data in terms of compliance and accuracy. The operating systems will easily cope with the problem of data duplication, and the built-in technical and business rules engines will smoothly adapt to the individual needs of each company. However, we have to remember that the chosen software should first of all cover our data scope and meets our own business goals. Depending on whether we want to find a solution for managing product data, we can choose a master data management system. If we want to exchange data with our business partners like orders or invoices, we can choose electronic data interchange, or if we want to increase sales efficiency, we can look for a good sales force automation solution. It all depends on our needs and the goals we want to achieve.
So, my question is what are yours? If you’d like to talk about finding the best answers to your data management needs, contact me at Joanna.Dobrzynska@comarch.com.
