Life coaches, wellness therapists, and psychologists say you should control your emotions before they control you.
Today’s business experts have a similar saying: manage your data before it manages you.
No one can dispute that all businesses, regardless of size, industry, product, or location, generate data. Valuable information such as their market research and validation results, customer profiles, customer sales and transaction history, marketing strategies and tactics are all being generated by businesses — from startups to the world’s largest corporations.
The sad reality, however, is that many of these businesses do not have the resources to properly manage their data. Whether it’s a lack of knowledge, financial, technology capital, or a combination of these three, data management is a real concern that many businesses are struggling with.
And when their data reaches a point where it qualifies to be called big data, this concern, if left unresolved, brings with it a host of major problems.
Data management plays a fundamental role in resolving data-related issues of enterprises, especially big data analytics.
Without data management, all the data that your enterprise has accumulated and is presently accumulating can be all for nothing. They may be deleted by mistake. They may be left unsorted and placed in improper categories, making it very challenging for you to retrieve them in the future. They may end up in the wrong hands, get stolen and lost forever. Without an effective and secure data management system in place, one of your enterprise’ most precious resource — your ever-expanding data — is put at risk.
In a survey conducted with over 200 respondents, the biggest challenges facing big data analytics arose from an ineffective data management system:
46%: fragmented data in silos across different units
35%: lack or ineffective coordination of big data teams
27%: ineffective procedures for governing big data
An effective data management system can minimize all these problems, if not eradicate them completely. When your business has an established, efficient, and seamless procedure for accessing, storing, and retrieving data, you can push through with your big data analytics with less headaches, minimum stress, and no wasted resources.
Aside from these benefits, data management helps ensure that the big data your business owns is protected and can be used to help you make better business decisions.
Just how big of a role does data management have on solving big data analytics problems?
We can shed light on the answer to this query by asking another question: Can big data analytics happen without data management?
Data management is the foundation of an enterprise’s successful relationship with its data, big or small. It would be extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, for any business to pursue data analytics when their data is scattered, misplaced and unorganized.
That said, data management is a preliminary requirement for any business seeking to solve their big data analytics problems. Once the infrastructure for your big data has been established, together with a comprehensive list of policies and regulations governing its use, big data analytics would be much easier, faster and efficient undertaking for your business.
