Why Data Management Is Important

Your business likely has several internal sources of data to tap into as well as external sources that can provide additional insights to tell you how well you’re running your business. But having access to data is not enough; you also need to manage data effectively so you can “pick the fruit” at just the right time—not too early when the data is raw, and not too late when the data is no longer fresh.

Data management involves collecting, organizing, storing, transforming, visualizing, collaborating, governing and securing your organization’s data so it can be analyzed for business decisions. Managing data effectively requires the ability to create reports that pull from different systems of record and reconcile the different data schemas. You also need to be able to rapidly scale your data collection abilities to handle new data sources and existing sources with increasing volumes of data.

Then there’s the need to ensure consistent data security to prevent the loss of key company information. And while it’s important to prevent unauthorized access, you want to provide authorized users who do not have analytical training with self-service data analysis tools that make it easy to discover insights. Your internal teams likely don’t have time to learn complicated processes, but they still need to find answers fast.

The Benefits of Data Management

Solving these challenges is well worth the effort when you consider the benefits of effective data management that provide personalized reports for your KPI owners. You gain real-time insights with comprehensive views of your business operations by bringing advanced analytics to complement your systems of record. You can also generate deeper insights, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) that gives you 360-degree perspectives of how well your business and your processes function. Moreover, when your data foundation is solid, AI can provide predictive and prescriptive guidance.

With the ability to scale analytics across all your data sources, you can also eliminate isolated data silos and maximize the business value of the data by combining data exploration, insights, and integrated governance. Your teams can explore Big Data sets faster to get the answers they need to run your business more efficiently.

Help for Your Data Management Journey

Just having data doesn't mean the data is a business enabler. It can be a long journey between having data and being able to leverage data to its maximum potential. The number and the value of business insights you gain from effective data management are proportional to the number of data sources you can relate and bring together.

For example, can you relate transactional sales data with product sentiment data on social media? Can you generate accurate insights and factor positive and negative sentiment about products into your sales and marketing strategies? Can you leverage manufacturing data obtained directly from IoT sensors to improve production or design?

To help you answer questions like these and complete your journey to effective data management, Western Computer will present a series of upcoming blogs that examine how Microsoft tools like Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Azure Synapse Analytics Power Apps help you create data repositories, pipelines, models, reports, dashboards and processes that make it easier to ingest and transform data, analyze and visualize data, collaborate and govern data. Done right, these elements within the overall data management process will help your business increase revenue, lower operational costs, and improve employee productivity.

If you need help managing your company’s data, Western Computer is here to help. Contact us today to learn more about our Microsoft solutions and how they can help you aggregate, analyze and govern all of your data sources.

About the Author

Senior Data Architect Rasvan Grigorescu has more than 20 years of leadership and technical experience in driving business value from data.

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