Data Management in a Dynamic Work Environment

Caught in the never-ending loop of company data mismanagement?

With the rapid development of technology and customers of every sector inclining more towards e-commerce, there is an overflow of unsaturated data in every industry. Since the entire marketing business depends completely on the amount and quality of data collected, businesses try to gather as much data as possible. But at the same time, it is also important to saturate the data to leverage the real power of it. 

In this digitally driven world, relevant data has become the most valuable asset of any organization. To survive the modern economy, companies need to understand the importance of data management.

What is data management?

If your organization has a dynamic work environment, the way you plan, control, and deliver data plays a huge role in your business’s overall success. Relevant data helps collect business analytics, depending on the result of which companies make future decisions and actions. Complete, accurate, meaningful, and actionable data enables organizations to have a better vision of their business perspective, helping them frame a business strategy accordingly.

This entire process of treating data, through its entire lifecycle (data creation, storage, maintaining, and destroying) is known as data management, and organizations need to develop their data management process to increase the quality of the data.

Benefits of data management in a dynamic work environment

• Minimized errors: Since most of the business decisions made these days depend on data analytics, building a data stack that filters all the irrelevant data, reduces mistakes made by incorporating false or wrong data. Thus effective data management is very important in minimizing potential errors and reducing the business damages caused by bad data. Try avoiding copy-pasting or drag-dropping data, and build an effective data management strategy to better control the health of your business data.
• Improved efficiency: An effective data management reduces data operation time before analyzing a specific area, giving your employees enough time to focus on other relevant areas to improve work efficiency. A properly managed, updated, accessible, and enhanced data can grow your organization exponentially as compared to a mismanaged or error-prone data.
• Protection from data security issues: Company data is the most targeted object of most hackers and if breached successfully, can create a huge disruption to your entire business. Thus the security of your organizational data is very important, and proper data management helps keep the most sensitive data separate so that you can take special security measures.
• Data quality improvement: You can improve your data quality only when you have it managed properly. Moreover, well-managed data can provide you with easy and controlled access to your database to help you scan through needed data easily.

How to manage data in a dynamic work environment?

Leverage the real power of data to your business by harnessing it through proper management and understanding your business’s needs and customers. Here is a list of industry best practices that will you manage your data to perfection even in a dynamic work environment:

• Dynamic workforce adds a new set of risks, and thus you need to keep modifying your data policies and procedures regularly to protect your data to which any third party has access to. Organizations that outsource offshore development or customer support centers to complement onshore staff should be more careful about this point. You also need to address regional variations in workers attitudes toward data privacy if your workforce is spread across the globe. Globalization makes technology and the regulatory process complex, but that is no excuse to avoid it.
• With workers around the world seeking a collaborative environment with the freedom to work from anywhere and with the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working is the new normal. To build a dynamic work environment, you need to follow the trend. But with remote work culture and employees using personal devices to access company data, there is a high scope for a breach into your database. To avoid such a situation, you can incorporate on-premise cloud solutions and other advanced IoT devices with strong cybersecurity services.
• Incorporate data management tools that can integrate with your existing and core marketing database, software, CRM, and accounting systems. This will offer you an easier and faster way to analyze data results that includes your previously built data as well.
• On detection of any workforce-related threats, take a speeding action by comparing user access and authentication logs with the captured network, packet, log, and endpoint data. This will help you track any unusual behavior in your database, allowing you to stop the breach and save your organization from time-consuming and exorbitant litigation and compliance violations.
• You should schedule a quarterly or biannual data management health audit to keep the security, lifecycle, quality, and flow of your data under check. This will ensure quick and easy data access for the authorized members, speeding up your workflow.
• If your organization has a dynamic work environment with several teams, you need to make your valuable data shareable among teams. Thus, ensure that the data integrates between applications without code or development, without any plausible security risk. The integration of APIs allows you to give selective access to data to third parties by restricting access to only relevant data.
• Document company data in the form of data dictionaries, readme files, and embedded metadata to provide users with a guideline and context to the data. This will help your vast workforce to understand and interpret the data while solving business problems. To keep your data organized, you can archive your old data that is important, but is not of use at the moment.

When you know how to manage data properly, the data life cycle begins even before it is acquired. Practicing the disciplines of data management development right when you start collecting and executing it throughout the data lifecycle will help you get the perfect metrics needed for your marketing strategy. 

Capturing the right data and cleaning, protecting, and enriching it in real-time, helps you keep track of different kinds of data ranging from customer names, addresses, contact details, and special days, which helps boost customer experience. Supervise all your data management plans and policies to protect, control, deliver, and enhance the quality and value of organization data.