Data management is a challenge for many companies. However, there are reflexes to have in order to guarantee sound data
For 25 years, Libéo has been working with the largest organizations to develop tailor-made digital products (software, applications, etc.). However, our observation is that it is difficult to develop such products if your organization has not yet implemented sound data governance. It is for this reason that we present an article on this subject. With your company’s classified and released data, we’ll be able to help you get into the next gear with a high-performing digital product.
This list could be even longer! Your company has everything to gain by implementing sound and optimal data management. You will be able to see improvements in both your strategic and operational activities.
Establish data governance
To demonstrate good data management, you should have your data governance in your hands. Data governance includes the list of procedures that govern the management of your data, from their collection to their archiving or deletion. Its objective is to help ensure the availability, relevance, user-friendliness, integrity and security of all the information you hold and which circulates within your walls. It is thanks to solid data governance that you will be able to make your data strategic assets and make better decisions!
You should therefore take the time to establish good data governance. But don’t be afraid! Our next sections will help you adopt the right reflexes!
It is useless to have all the possible data if they do not lead to any decision. It is important to clearly understand the needs of each of your departments to determine the list of data that you must collect and process. To do this, everything must start from the direction.
With these answers, establish the list of data that you wish to have. You should also indicate their level of importance and security. Not all data is good to share with all your employees. Determining confidentiality levels is therefore important. You can decide whether your data is public, internal, confidential or secret.
If you work in a medium or large company, you can also decide to hire or appoint a chief data officer . This is also strongly recommended if your medium-term objective is to set up a data management department! The latter will be able to coordinate your efforts and provide you with technical and functional elements.
Once this initial reflection is complete, redo the same exercise by bringing the heads of each of your departments around the table. You will thus obtain a complete list of the data necessary for your strategic and operational activities!
Although they seem long and complicated to implement, these first thoughts are essential. They will prevent you from accumulating too much useless data, overloading your storage capacities, asking your teams for data that does not exist or choosing the wrong tools for your daily analyses.
Have access to data in a safe and optimal way
Now that you know what data is important to you, it’s time to determine whether or not it currently exists in your business. You can go data by data or go by listing your current data sources. And since you also need to think about unstructured data (email, PDF documents, etc.), you should know what internal tools you use that participate in information flows.
Thus, you will quickly realize that some data is missing. You should then consider collecting them. Collecting data means taking an approach to gathering and measuring information that comes from different sources. These sources can be internal to your company.
For example, you want to know your net profits on a product category. All you have to do is aggregate some of your data or integrate several of them into a single calculation. However, there may be times when some information does not come from your company and therefore you have to rely on external data sources. You might want to analyze how many show tickets you sold from different platforms, like Ticket master . To do this, you will need access to this information since these databases do not belong to you.
Establishing the different data sources needed for each piece of data is therefore essential to understanding all the actors that are involved and the actions you need to take to gather the desired information. And it is also an important reflection of data governance!