Apart from people, your data is your most vital business asset. Today it’s easy to create huge amounts of data relating to your customers, employees, competitors and market trends. And this data can be used to make better-informed decisions, increase business efficiency and delight your customers.
But the sheer volume of data available to your organisation brings its own set of challenges. Apart from requiring the right on-premises and/or cloud-based infrastructure to store, transfer and process all your data, you need to identify your most relevant big data storage solution and determine its accuracy.
Data management best practices
Dufrain’s Data Management experts have devised five best practices to help you optimise your business in the age of big data.
1) Align your data goals with your business goals
If you’re starting your data management journey or looking to fix a failing data strategy, you should begin by outlining exactly what you want to achieve with your company’s data.
Having a good understanding of what you’re planning to do with your data means you only need to focus on the data that’s relevant to your goal. This will help to minimise complexity while reducing data storage requirements and costs.
So, what are the business goals you want to achieve? This could be anything from improving decision making to identifying customers’ buying patterns. The point is, if you align your data processes with your business goals, you won’t end up with huge swathes of data that are surplus to business requirements.
2) Focus on data quality
You can’t make better-informed data-driven business decisions without trustworthy and reliable data quality management. Outdated and irrelevant data must be removed to keep your data sets primed for optimum value.
Data literacy within your organisation is a must. Do your employees have a good understanding of how to set up and automate data collection processes? Are they confident when it comes to accessing and using the data so they can generate added value? Training is key to ensuring your data is collected, accessed and interpreted correctly.
You should also ensure data is checked and cleaned before using it for analytics or reporting purposes. This will improve the accuracy of all metrics pulled from your data. Ultimately, your company’s data must be clean and reliable.
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3) Eliminate duplicate data
Duplicate data is a generally accepted fact of business life but there are solutions. You can implement the right data management processes to manage and eliminate redundancies.
This is a key factor, especially at the beginning of your data strategy. You must create systems that allow data to be updated or changed when someone opts in more than once or makes a return purchase, for instance. Putting in precautions when it comes to duplicate data and redundancies is an additional way of ensuring your data stays clean.
Data collating is another important aspect to consider. Read our blog to learn more.
4) Make your data accessible to all the right people
Of course, security of your data is high priority. You don’t want anyone without the proper permissions to gain access to your business data. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it difficult and time-consuming for your own people to access the data they require to complete their tasks effectively.
Setting up the right logins and access permissions for all your employees based on their roles, and managing this correctly, is essential. Implementing different levels of permissions for everyone from executives to sales reps will make it simple and logical for everyone to access the right data as soon as they require it. Having the same set of rules for everyone will either be too restrictive (not good for business) or too open (not good from a security standpoint).
Learn more about business analysis.
5) Most importantly, make sure your data is secure
You don’t want to fall victim to a data breach and endanger the data privacy of your entire customer base, right? That’s why you should use data management processes that are designed to safeguard your data. This will also help you to comply with GDPR and the various industry regulations when it comes to data collection.
A key part of data management is having the right people in charge and making sure that everybody knows how to handle your company’s data in a safe and secure way. And to minimise the risk of a potential data breach or cyberattack, make sure you have a plan of action. With the right data management in place, you’ll sleep better at night.
Dufrain is a market-leading data analytics consultancy. If you’re looking to optimise your data management, our experts would love to hear from you.