What Is Data Management?

Data is becoming an important corporate asset. It drives decisions, improves campaigns, optimizes operations and lowers costs. The data is only useful to the company if it’s well-organized and easily accessible. Data management is the main element of this area of expertise.

At its core, data management is the process of creating procedures which govern how data will be collected, acquired and used to meet business requirements. The term also includes procedures and systems to ensure that data is correct, complete and up-to-date.

Today, organizations are dealing with a massive amount and variety of data from structured, controlled data to unstructured and informal sources. This increasing complexity is driving the creation of new tools for managing and interpreting the data. New technologies include more efficient processing, cloud-based services for handling massive amounts of data, as well as innovative ways to organize the data into structures that are easier to use by analytics and BI apps.

Additionally new regulations, such as GDPR make it even more important to have a good system for managing personal information and giving individuals the ability to control how their personal data is collected, used and shared. Some of these new technologies are aimed at making data environments easier to manage by automating integration and facilitating reuse some are based on decentralized architectures and federated governance, which allows each business unit to agree on policies and standards for the organization. Some companies are leveraging data observability as a way to monitor and report on data quality.