Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 22 | Page 17

EDITOR’S COMMENT ot g ie t er Ma na g ing D ire a at n D nsio e m i ctor – UAE D D ata is one of the most important assets of an organisation and its effective management and usage is key to keeping its competitive advantage. Data management is critical to any organisation that collects, stores and manages data and can increase revenue by using this data to optimise business processes and reduce inefficiencies. Companies generate massive volumes of structured and unstructured data every day and data management is the first step towards controlling this data and exploiting it to gain useful insights that could help the business. Sorting out the relevant data from the duplicates, dark data and redundant data, adds to the complexities of data management. Hence, it is important for organisations to put policies and processes in place so that they can get best insights into their business and use it effectively to achieve the organisation’s business objectives. For data to be managed effectively and efficiently, the company needs to align it with their business strategy and define what data is needed to move forward. The master data provides a single version of the organisation’s most important data, thus helping the business reduce errors from relying on different versions of data. This ensures that applications built on the master data are more likely to be accurate and effective. Businesses should think carefully on their data collection procedures and documentation before they start the data collection process. They need to use data templates to ensure only relevant and usable data is collected. This data should also be checked for quality and consistency with problem areas flagged. All data collected should be documented and have metadata tags to describe its context and enable users to search and use the data. Data management also offers businesses improved security measures and compliance as they have greater transparency of their business processes and data, which allows them to delete or secure data as required. By monitoring this data, they are able to find any irregularities that require further investigation. Data management helps the organisation gain valuable insights from the data to customise and personalise services, thus enhancing INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 22 EFFICIENT DATA MANAGEMENT FOR OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE PAUL POTGIETER MANAGING DIRECTOR – UAE DIMENSION DATA customer experience and loyalty. Effective data management can help reduce storage costs as companies can discard data that is not necessary and also save time on analysis. Through the use of leading enterprise applications with global vendors, as well as other best-of-breed products, Dimension Data can help businesses enable the digitisation of their business processes and the management of that data. Effective management of its data is key to an organisation’s survival. ˜ For data to be managed effectively and efficiently, the company needs to align it with their business strategy and define what data is needed to move forward. 17