Data management is a procedure that involves creating and enforcing procedures, policies and processes to handle data throughout its entire life cycle. It ensures that data is easily accessible and useful, which facilitates the compliance of regulators and makes informed decisions, and ultimately provides companies with a competitive advantage.

The importance of effective data management has grown significantly as organizations automate their business processes, leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and deploy data warehouses, among other initiatives. This results in a growing amount of data that needs to be consolidated and then delivered to business analytics (BI) systems such as enterprise resource management (ERP) platforms as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors,, machine learning, and generative artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, to provide advanced insights.

Without a well-defined and standardized data management plan, businesses can end up with uncompatible data silos and unbalanced data sets that hinder the ability to run analytics and business intelligence applications. A poor data management strategy can reduce trust between employees and customers.

To address these challenges it is crucial that companies make a plan for data management (DMP) that includes the processes and people required to manage all kinds of data. A DMP, for example can assist researchers in determining the file naming conventions that they should follow to arrange data sets to keep them for a long time and make them simple to access. It may also include the data workflow that outlines the steps to cleanse, checking and integrating raw as well as refined data sets to allow them to be suitable for analysis.

A DMP https://taeglichedata.de/maintaining-data-processes-throughout-the-information-lifecycle/ can be utilized by organizations that collect consumer data to ensure compliance with privacy laws at the state and global scale, such as the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union or California’s Consumer Privacy Act. It can be used to guide the development and implementation of policies and procedures that address security concerns for data.