In an ever-evolving digital era, it’s crucial for any organization aiming to remain competitive, to implement effective data management for a user experience that stands out. This prioritization enables clear insights into successful strategies and areas needing improvement. But with this massive amount of data comes the need for proper organization and management. Data management is essential for organizations to derive meaning from the data they track and achieve their objectives. Let’s look at how data management impacts your organization, its purpose, and what strategies you can employ to improve your data management.
You might wonder about the necessity and benefits of implementing data management practices for your organization’s growth, which is a great place to start. Understanding the multitude of benefits that come with well-structured data management processes aids in buy-in from the entire team, ensuring the implementation of these processes. Data management has 5 main benefits for your organization:
- Data consistency
- Data quality improvement
- Improved decision making
- Enhanced business planning
- Increased ROI
DATA MAPPING
To gain valuable insights from your data, it's crucial to comprehend your objectives, assess gaps, and establish clear goals. The first step to identifying crucial data for your organization involves mapping and tracking data movement from its source. Whether you're mapping where incoming data is being populated, or simply identifying what data each platform in your MarTech stack is collecting, this allows you to determine how consistent these analytics are. Mapping your data also allows you to create a framework that will help you manage your data effectively and implement data governance.
Data mapping is particular to every business, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. How you decide to implement this task will depend on data volume, systems, and scalability. There are multiple platforms out there, such as Segment or talend, to help you automate this process, or your team can manually map data for your companies to better understand the usage of platforms to better fuel your data framework.
ESTABLISH A DATA GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK
After analyzing your data, the next step is to establish a data framework. This framework sets guidelines for handling sensitive data, storage, and maintaining data quality. The proper data framework guarantees data completeness, accuracy, and currency, enriching your strategic insights. Data standardization is also crucial when implementing data frameworks that deal with multiple data sources. It's important to ensure that all data is compatible and can be integrated seamlessly into a single datasheet. The framework must adapt to accommodate emerging data sources. Some best practices for establishing your data governance framework include:
- Think of the bigger picture. Data governance is a marathon, not a sprint. This framework should be implemented amongst your entire team for years to come.
- Pilot projects are your best friend! Test your framework on smaller projects before implementing them across the board to eventually weave into your organization.
- Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). By developing and implementing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the entire data lifecycle, no matter who accesses this information from your team, there are consistent processes in place.
- Set a baseline for what you're trying to achieve by implementing data management into your organization. Collect these metrics at the beginning to consistently track each milestone along the way to ensure that the data framework you're implementing is practical and effective.
AUTOMATE YOUR DATA MANAGEMENT
Automating data management processes conserves time and resources that can be channeled to other areas of an organization, such as strategic planning. Common automated processes in data management include backup and data archiving, report generation, data processing, and data migration. Automation minimizes human error risk, maintaining consistent data quality. Automation also enables organization-wide collaboration by making data available to everyone, thus encouraging informed decision-making.
For example, when utilizing a CRM such as HubSpot, automated dashboards or reports can generate real-time key metrics. These reports can be emailed to you biweekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on how frequently you're reviewing each report.
ONGOING OPTIMIZATION
Many organizations see data management as a one-time task. But in reality, data management is a continuous process. Regular optimization of data management strategies aligns data with business goals. The optimization process should include regular reviews, quality checks, and updates to data frameworks and processes to match your evolving organizational needs. Optimization should also include updating security measures and policies to meet the ever-changing threat landscape.
By implementing effective data management tools and techniques, organizations can improve their data accuracy, quality, and consistency. These best practices, like mapping data goals, data governance frameworks, automation, and ongoing optimization, organizations can streamline your data management processes and stay ahead of the competition. Unsure where to start? Let us help.