Establishing best practices is key to making data management a success in your organization. It is important to understand that this is a business project with IT support — not a project that’s driven by the IT group. IT-driven data management projects usually offer limited value because technology professionals lack business users’ deep understanding of the organization’s data.
Define your goals.
Since you can’t reach your destination if you don’t know where it is, the first step on your data management journey is to set goals for what you want to achieve. Defining goals helps determine the processes you will use for collecting, storing, organizing, categorizing, risk-profiling, maintaining, cleansing, securing and analyzing your data. Clearly defining your goals also ensures you’re only managing the data you really need.
Make a plan.
Once you have firmly established your goals, develop a plan of action. The first step is to identify and gather input from people throughout the business who really understand the data that their department uses — and what it needs. This will help you build a data management plan that includes calculating data usage estimates, setting accessibility guidelines, determining approaches to archiving, assigning data ownership and stewardship and much more. As time goes on, the plan will serve both as a reference guide and a living document that evolves as your data needs change.
Maintain data quality.
Data is constantly changing. Customer and vendor addresses are a classic example. If a customer or vendor changes their location, you need a mechanism to allow them to update their address — or better yet, a mechanism that notifies you of the change and updates your systems automatically. As you can probably imagine, many other changes frequently occur in a living system, and it can require a significant amount of effort to ensure that data remains accurate.
Secure your data.
Data security is of paramount importance to all organizations today. When threat actors infiltrate an organization, they typically try to steal, corrupt, delete and/or encrypt data in order to force the company into paying a ransom. Data management plays a key role in protecting the organization’s vital information. It gives you a better understanding of your data, so you can selectively apply stronger levels of control and isolation to your more sensitive information. But remember that security is an ever-evolving target, and static approaches to security policies will be quickly out of date. It’s important to continually monitor the latest threats and determine whether you need to adjust your security strategy accordingly.
Create a data management function.
Data in even a midsize organization is complex, and no single person can understand all the company’s data to the level needed to manage it. That’s why it is important to build a data management team that includes people who have a good understanding of the data as well as the organizational knowledge to know who is responsible for the data within each department. For a successful data management initiative, you need people who understand the business and the data that business groups produce and consume. A cross-functional data management team allows you to gather best-in-class practices and build synergies within your organization.
NetSuite: The Data Management Platform of the Future
NetSuite provides businesses with a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications built on a single database. NetSuite policies and infrastructure ensure that your data is always replicated, backed up and available from any location, whenever you need it. NetSuite data management also ensures that your users have real-time visibility into the company’s financials, customer data and inventory, allowing them to make informed decisions quickly and easily. Replication and synchronization across data centers provide built-in disaster recovery capabilities and business continuity assurance. The cloud-based system is designed from the ground up to support steady increases in transaction volumes and spikes in usage.
NetSuite also offers a set of capabilities specifically designed for product data management, so that master design and development data is centrally stored and accessible to all stakeholders.
With more than 33,000 customers making more than 1.5 billion requests daily and 6 petabytes of data already under management, NetSuite offers proven scalability to support business growth.
Modern businesses are data-driven. Success hinges on the ability to use data to gain insights and make better decisions that increase revenue and reduce costs. But analyzing data can be a time-consuming and fruitless exercise when you’re relying on inaccurate data spread across the organization. Data management systems help solve the problem, ensuring that the company has accurate, reliable information by addressing data capture, maintenance, security, management, categorization and access. Data management helps make information the engine that drives value for the organization, its customers and stakeholders.