Data management: benefits and keypoints

January 13, 2021

Data is the new energy source. How are you managing data in 2021?

We can say undoubtedly that 2021 is the year when definitely companies have to work with data. Because it is the force that converts knowledge and insights into action. Companies need more than ever to understand its power, to identify the information that they have, and learn to make good use of it with solid practices of data management.

The use of the information has great benefits that companies need to use to achieve an advantage over their competitors. There is one important point that business managers need to have in mind about data management. And this point is that those who use it win and those who don’t suffer the consequences.

What is data management?

Data management depends more on the practices than the technologies that your business has. It combines certain practices like collecting, keeping, and using the information in ways that are secure, efficient, and cost-effective. The connection of different data sources like structured databases or unstructured information makes it possible to obtain the content and knowledge needed to make decisions and take actions that maximize the benefit to the organization. Today, a strong data management strategy is one of the most important practices that a company has to achieve. It’s an intangible asset that creates one of the organization’s major values.

How are you managing data in 2021?

In this modern economy, companies that don’t understand the importance of data management are less likely to survive because a company’s information is its most valuable asset. Data is the foundation of every modern business. Information and knowledge are the main tools to correct decisions and actions. I mean it when I say that data is the new oil. Certainly, information is today’s most powerful energy source for your business. But your company needs help to make effective usage of their data.

First, you need to know exactly at which point of the data management process your business is. To know it, you first need to answer a series of questions. The industry has been talking about this for at least 5 years, but we are now in 2021, what are we waiting to take advantage of what we have and what we can achieve? Particularly in a pandemic time when the digital transformation only accelerates

Where is your business on the path to effective data usage?

Do you have data?

It seems obvious, but it is the first of all things to know when we talk about data management. Maybe your company needs certain information that it doesn’t have. So first, you have to prepare your company’s information systems to start collecting valuable data.

Is all your data integrated?

Maybe your data is in silos. That means that your company’s information is separated and not accessible by other parts of the organization. If you are at this point in the data management process, you need to start consolidating and integrating the information in all your information systems. Removing data silos and integrating the data will help you to get the right information at the right time so you can make good decisions.

Are you using OLAP and OLTP tools?

These two terms may look very similar, but they refer to different kinds of systems. OLTP refers to Online transaction processing and OLAP to Online analytical processing.

OLTP systems are those that capture, store, and process data from transactions in real-time.
OLAP systems are those that use complex queries to analyze aggregated historical data from OLTP systems. If you are already using this kind of tool, you need to start exploring how you can benefit from them. It is important to find the right use cases for your business. You have to make sure you don’t lose the possibility of running key analytics and heavy queries to your data without impacting your transactional day to day operations.

Are you doing proactive activities with data like marketing, boosting sales, or cost management?

Practices like marketing, boosting sales, or cost management are great to improve your company’s data management process. If your company is not taking advantage of this kind of proactive activity with data, you better start doing it.

Marketing will improve your company’s public visibility, so you will obtain much more data for your new users or customers. Personalized communication will bring relevant content to the right users, instead of broadcasting general messages with non-relevant information for many customers.
Boosting sales will improve the performance in your business. You can achieve this by concentrating on your existing customers, learning about your competitors, making innovative and unique products, building a customer service approach, and making personalized marketing and promotion campaigns.
By making cost management you will obtain important data about estimating, allocating, and controlling the costs of your company’s project. You can learn from your data, from the data generated by your business, and it allows you to predict coming expenses to reduce and control your budget, or just to optimize it by removing non-relevant costs.

Are you aggregating data from external sources like social media, costumer journeys, mobile phones, IoT devices?

Your business can obtain valuable information from external sources like social media, customer journeys, mobile phones, or IoT devices. If you aren’t doing it, the phone is ringing, this call is for you, and it says that “you need to begin aggregating data from external sources”. Social media data analytics is the base rock of an effective digital marketing campaign. It will help you make marketing with real facts in your hand instead of being based alone on instinct. The customer journey considers the full experience of being a customer and there exist ways to obtain important data from this kind of practice. Also, your company can obtain valuable information from mobile phones and other IoT devices.

Are you using Machine Learning and AI?

Once you have the right data, in quality and volume, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to extract information and get insights to extract knowledge in multiple areas that impact the business. AI allows us to introduce automation, to focus on higher-impact tasks, and to find patterns in our data, but we have not been using them so far.

Machine Learning (ML) can be used to reduce costs such as transport and warehousing. It can be useful by reducing inventory to a lean but comfortable level and to predict demand shortly.

AI and ML have become some of the most transformational technologies in the history of the world, affecting most aspects of our everyday lives, although we are not conscious of it. The application of these technologies is reshaping how people work, study, consume and do every kind of activity. This kind of new technology works with several factors including a vast corpus of data, the required algorithms, the relevant skills, and the appropriate compute resources. All this joined with the right physical and virtual server infrastructure allows organizations to achieve high-performance data processing and analytics.

Finally, I want to finish this article by saying that data management is a critical enabler of AI and ML projects. It helps overcome difficulties that can be a significant barrier to success such as accessing and preparing the data for these projects.

About ZirconTech: A trusted partner that helps organizations thrive in their digital transformations. Mobility, Internet of things, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and blockchain technologies.