What Is Data Management?
Data Management encompasses a broad range of processes, tools and techniques that assist an organization organize the huge amounts of data it accumulates each day, while also ensuring its collection and usage adhere to all laws and regulations as well as up to date security standards. These best practices are vital for companies that wish to use data in a manner that improves business processes, while reducing risk and enhancing productivity.
Often, the term “Data Management” is used interchangeably with terms like Data Governance and Big Data Management, but the most formal definitions of this area focus on how an organization manages data and information assets from end to end. This includes storing and collecting of data, delivering and sharing of data, creating, updating and deleting data as well as giving access to data for use in analytics and applications.
One of the most crucial aspects of Data Management is outlining a strategy for managing data before (for many funders) or in the early months following (EU funding) an investigation begins. This is crucial to ensure that the integrity of the study is maintained and the findings of the study are based on accurate and reliable data.
Data Management challenges include ensuring end users can find and access relevant information, especially when data is spread out across multiple systems and storage spaces in different formats. Data linesage records, dictionaries and tools that combine disparate sources of data are beneficial. The data must also be available to other researchers to make it available for reuse in the long run. This means using interoperable file formats such as.odt and.pdf instead of Microsoft Word document formats and ensuring that all the necessary information required to understand the data is captured and documented.