Data management is the process of getting data and then storing, using, and protecting it reliably. With good data management comes great insights that lead to better business decisions.
Why Should You Manage Your Data?
Increased Productivity
A good data management system leads to more productivity. How does it facilitate this? Due to data arrangement, it is easier for your personnel to locate the information they need, allowing your staff to validate results quickly.
Cost-Efficiency
You will save more resources because good data management allows your organization to store and retrieve data more efficiently. This ensures that your employees don’t misplace files in the system and have to redo work.
Faster and Better Decision Making
Data management helps your personnel get top insights that allow businesses to make decisions and change direction using real-time data, helping your business to be successful. Some data management solutions notify your employees of changes in the market or competitors. Your business would have the ability to make decisions faster than competitors.
Making Your Data Management Solutions Efficient
A good data management plan allows you to schedule audits to check for data integrity to avoid errors, under or overutilization of tools, and security blind spots.
In this blog, you will learn about a few ways to make your data management solutions more effective.
01. Have Data Goals
You should have an outlined plan for your business data. This means knowing what data to collect and what to do with the collected data. Having an outlined plan helps you keep only the data relevant to your business and prevents your data management solution or software from getting overloaded.
Some of the goals that you might consider while writing your business goals might be:
- Improving decision-making
- Create automation and processes
- Audience targeting
- Finding customer buying patterns
02. Prioritize Data Protection and Security
Data protection should be your priority, to avoid any unwanted people gaining access to your data. By focusing on security, you make sure that your customer base information does not fall into the wrong hands.
With the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the EU in 2018, you must follow all guidelines to ensure your customers’ data privacy.
Using proper data management solutions helps ensure data security and complies with GDPR and other regulations.
03. Focus On Data Quality
While limiting the data your company collects to only what it needs improves data quality. There are other steps you can take to ensure that the collected data remains clean and reliable.
The first step is data checking. This means checking data for accuracy so it does not become outdated, affecting your sales and marketing efforts, analytics, and other processes that require accurate data. Outdated data should be removed from your data management solution.
The second step to improving data quality is training all team members who have access to the data on the proper way to collect and input data. It’s essential in instances where team members manually add data to your data management solution.
Finally, before data is used in analytics or reporting, you must ensure the data is checked and cleaned. This vastly improves the accuracy of all metrics pulled from said data.
04. Reduce Data Duplication
Ensure that your company has a process in place to reduce or eliminate duplicate data. For instance, if a customer opts for multiple lead magnets or a customer returns to buy another product, resulting in duplicate data, you should make sure your data management solution is on point.
Many companies may not prioritize reducing data duplication when first setting up their data management solutions. However, it’s essential to create systems that allow data to be changed or updated once a customer repeats a purchase.
05. Improve Data Accessibility
Your data should be readily accessible to authorized personnel while entirely inaccessible for someone without the proper permissions. This means striking a balance between security and convenience.
Your authorized personnel shouldn’t have to use a lot of time and effort to get access to data.
You can set up unique logins and access for personnel based on their data needs. Executives and team leaders need to have more permissions than those who only need certain data types. By setting up logins and access permissions, your data security improves as well. Your customer data is kept safe, reducing the chances of a breach.
06. Create a Data Recovery Plan
Accidents happen, and your business needs to have a data recovery strategy in place. If you were to lose all your customer data, your marketing efforts would be severely affected. Therefore a backup or recovery plan should be in place.
You can regularly export your data to an offline storage facility or hard drive, or you could upload the exported data to a cloud platform, e.g., google drive or Dropbox. You could also use both methods to be even more secure. This way, if your data management solution were to misbehave, you have two backups in place.
07. Use a Quality Data Management Solution
Investing in the wrong data management solution can bring more bad than good. It may be too complex for your personnel to understand, too large for your business’s needs, or not secure enough for your business. By investing in the wrong data management solution, you cost your company money to learn a new system, train staff, and recreate your data input processes.
You need to find a data management solution that will give you accurate insight into your data. The platform should enable your sales and marketing teams to do their job easily by cleaning the data and ensuring that they have the most accurate data view.
Data management tools fall into these general categories:
- Cloud data management
- ETL and data integration
- Data transformation
- Master data management
- Reference data management
- Data analytics and visualization
To Sum It Up
- Data management is the process of getting data and then storing, using, and protecting it in a meaningful way. It’s a critical activity in today’s business world. With good data management practices, you can expect to have clear and accurate information and insights from your data.
- To make your data management better, you need to do the following;
- You need to have a clear strategy in place with specific data goals. The goals help you know what data is important to you and how you will use it.
- You need to prioritize data security, your customer’s data is crucial, and if it falls into the wrong hands, it could end your business.
- Data quality is key to having reliable data. Therefore ensure that you have a reliable solution that will help you clean data and update it to solve your business needs.
- Due to the data collected, you will run into trouble with data duplication. Therefore make sure that you have a data management solution that will reduce or eliminate data duplication.
- There’s no need to have a data management solution without improving data accessibility. When you improve data accessibility, you improve workflow and even data security.
- Accidents can happen anytime, you need to have a plan in case. This means that you should have a data recovery plan in place.
- Finally, you can achieve all the above using a quality data management solution. You need to know that you cannot use a one size fits all approach. Every situation is unique; thus, you need a tailor-made solution for your data management needs.