Data has become more valuable than ever in companies and organizations. Properly collecting, using, and managing them can make or break a company. Data can help an organization make the best business decisions to grow. At the same time, they can be a liability if mismanaged.
To reap the benefits of data and avoid its pitfalls, you must ensure that you do these nine data management practices in your business.
1. Define which data points to track
Know that the amount of data you can collect and accumulate can be a lot. And trying to make sense of every line and group of data can only make you waste resources. Because of that, make sure to identify and define the data you want to track and use.
While it’s okay to collect and keep everything you can get, it’s crucial that you only work on those that matter to your business. So, to make it easy for you to determine which data points to track, you may want to generate a report or chart to have a big picture view of your data. If you’re using WordPress as your site’s CMS, you may want to try using getting a WordPress table plugin to help you out with this task.
2. Define your goal
Before you even start gathering data, you must clearly define the purpose of your data collection. What are you trying to accomplish or find out with your data? What is the problem that the data you’ll get will solve? Do you need to acquire real-time data, or do you need to focus on historical data?
Knowing or defining why you need to collect data is crucial to help you manage your data easier and prevent you from wasting resources. It will also avoid getting you to do unnecessary data that could get you in trouble in the future. As mentioned in the previous section, visualizing your data can help you define your data collection goal.
3. Strengthen your communications
While it’s true that you should strengthen security when it comes to data, you must also not forget communications. Know that most people in your organization may require access to most of the information you collect. Aside from avoiding unauthorized access, you must also ensure that those who have access properly communicate their reasons and purpose when they access the same.
4. Choose a reliable data steward
Data stewards are point persons in companies in data management and governance. It might be you if you wish to take this role, or you need to assign one whom you can trust. Usually, data stewards are acquired from a company’s IT department.
When choosing a data steward, ensure that the person will be in a higher position. They must be familiar with how your business works and how the data you collect is used. And also, they must be familiar with the interface you use, and technical proficiency must be good enough to take responsibility in managing and governing the use of your data.
Several data importing tools on the market can become reliable data stewards for your business. They offer specific security standards for your products, which are functional, but your data is stored in their backend. While this may be fine for some businesses, others prefer more control over their data. Many Flatfile alternative options in the market allow you to self-host your data and maintain complete control over it. These softwares can be a great option for businesses concerned about security and privacy.
5. Constantly monitor and update your data
To prevent future data-related problems, you must constantly keep track of your data. You must always ensure that you have accurate and up-to-date data.
For example, having old addresses of your customers is useless to you. Keeping them and not updating them can lead to logistics problems, which could have been prevented in two to three minutes if someone had verified the correct customer address.
Also, be sure to track changes and have backups of your data. Even if you’re using the most secure applications or setup, it’s almost impossible to prevent data loss from happening. Because of that, you must make sure that you have file backups and redundancies if ever something happens to your local copies of your data.
6. Educate your organization when it comes to data
As mentioned before, most employees in your business may need to access your data. And unfortunately, the more employees there are who have access, the more data security vulnerabilities you can have. The only way to prevent them from becoming security vulnerabilities is to educate them on managing, using, and protecting data.
When educating your employees, make sure to teach them everything about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of data collection and management. Also, make sure to teach them how they can protect their data. After all, it’s easier for people to retain important information and lessons if they deem that they can personally benefit from them.
7. Build an effective IT infrastructure and strategy
Typically, it’s recommended that you get prebuilt systems or third-party vendors to help you with data management infrastructure. However, if you have an IT department, you may want to consider letting them build a reliable IT infrastructure and strategy for your data.
However, tread lightly on this one. In most cases, it’s much more convenient and secure to get a tried and tested system instead of creating one from scratch.
8. Always test your systems
While a good data infrastructure works fine at first, you must conduct periodic tests to ensure that your data systems are working as intended. Know that most systems are frequently updated and changed by their developers, and while system updates often fix past problems, they may also introduce new ones. Because of that, you shouldn’t disregard the importance of regular tests for potential vulnerabilities and issues in your data infrastructure.
9. Eliminate data silos
It’s common for companies and organizations to have local data silos. These data silos are often isolated from the rest of the company and can only be accessed by a handful of people. Short term, they don’t pose a huge problem. However, you must eliminate them and ensure that the data from these silos become widely available to everyone who needs access.
Having data silos with different data structures can also be a pain when it comes to data integration.
Conclusion
Those are the nine data management practices you should implement in your business. Thankfully, these practices are not that complex and can be done with the help of your IT department.
