Handling Data in Business

In the business world, it is very important to efficiently handle your data.  A company can collect massive amounts of data about customers, clients, suppliers, patients, employees, and more.  If they use this information properly, they can better understand the market and their target audience.  And as a result, their organization will be more successful.  So they need a way to organize and utilize that data to maximize its value, while managing the risks, maintaining security, keeping expenses low and remaining compliant with rules and regulations.  

One way a company can handle their data is to use a data management platform.  These platforms will help a company use the data they have in the most beneficial way.  When choosing a platform for data management, you need to look for one that provides data governance as well.

What is data governance?  It's a collection of processes, policies, standards and metrics that ensures that information gathered from all data sources is used in the most effective and efficient way to enable an organization to achieve its goals.  It defines who can take action on the data they have, what action they can take, and what data they can take action on. It also defines in what situations a person is able to take action on the data, and what methods they are able to use.  Data governance can be very confusing and hard to understand.  

Data governance benefits a company in many ways.  It gives a consistent view of the data, and uses common terminology to make it easier to understand.  It improves the quality of the data by ensuring that it is accurate, complete and consistent.  It makes data integration easier by connecting each customer and business entity together with a data roadmap.  It ensures compliance with all government regulations and industry requirements by creating a platform for meeting those demands.  And it establishes codes of conduct and practice to make sure that legal and security issues are addressed consistently.    

There are also many data governance tools that can be very helpful.  When choosing these tools, you should focus on the ones that will provide you with the most benefits.  They should help you to understand your data by using discovery, profiling and benchmarking.  It should help you improve the quality of your data through validation, data cleansing and data enrichment.  Managing your data with data integration applications that will allow you to track and trace your data is important.  You need to control your data with tools that actively review and monitor it.  Documenting your data so it can be augmented to increase relevancy, searchability, accessibility, linkability and compliance is also a good idea. 

Finding the right strategy for data governance is essential.  Without it, it's easy to get lost and buried beneath the massive quantity of data.  You need to maximize your data governance investments and minimize the risk of data breaches.  And the best way to do that is to have in place an effective strategy that will help you control and utilize your data.