What is Enterprise Data Management?

Why is it important?
How do I go about implementing it?

If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions, or even if you’ve never come across the term “enterprise data management” or EDM, this article will assist. Following is a break down of what EDM is, how it’s used, what its benefits are and what to consider when implementing your management solutions.

Enterprise Data

Let’s start by understanding what enterprise data is. Simply put, it’s just the information that is shared by users and/or stakeholders of any business, corporation or organisation. 

Enterprise data can be divided into multiple categories, such as internal and external data or according to the information it contains, such as processes or standards relating to the company.

The bigger a business gets the more data there will be, and the more essential it is to have a proper enterprise data management solution implemented. Without effective management, data can be lost, contain errors, be of low quality, lack security, be unscalable or just not be properly integrated and shareable. Mismanaged data is worthless data.

Enterprise Data Management

Like all aspects of a business, enterprise data needs to be managed effectively to ensure that data isn’t lost, and the company doesn’t suffer as a result. Significant time, energy and money is put into enterprise data management to ensure that all of the information needed is properly collected, modelled, secured and stored.

EDM is the process through which the business is able to gather, integrate, qualify, secure and share all of their data. More likely than not, the data is coming in from a bunch of different sources and needs to be properly managed and sorted before being securely shared with various stakeholders. Plus, it’s important to realise that in today’s highly digital and information-dependent age, businesses are being inundated with more and more data every year.

But it’s not the data that’s important, it’s what you do with it.

Data that is accessible but not helpful is not worth accessing, and data that is helpful but inaccessible is of no help at all. Accessible, helpful data can be utilised to inform decision making and enact positive, invaluable change to a business. EDM helps to organise your data and ensure it can be utilised for maximum benefit.

The Different Parts of EDM

There are a several different aspects to successful enterprise data management. 

Management 
Let’s start with the obvious one. Through the employment of an enterprise data management strategy and various applications and/or tools readily available in the market, an organisation can effectively organise, integrate and disseminate the necessary data. This specific methodology is called Master Data Management. Instead of having multiple points of data management, MDM ensures that there is a “master” copy of the data through which all projections and reporting remains consistent and accurate.

Integration
Integration is the process by which data that is streaming into a business from different sources is funnelled into one central hub. Proper integration ensures that the data is all coherent so that it can be easily accessible and reliably used.

Governance
Data governance ensures that the data being gathered and used is of a high quality and is properly secured. There are a number of processes and policies used by companies to both ensure the standard of the data gathered and also covers the responsibility and authority of an organisation in using that data.

Security
This one is fairly self-explanatory. In the context of EDM, data security refers to the procedures and tools used to keep the data protected from various threats, such as theft, leaking, loss or corruption. Due to the nature of the collection, collating and then disseminating data, your security procedures should protect your data at every stage of the journey.

Automation
Understanding how you implement your Data Management strategy in a disciplined and repeatable way and take full advantage of the tools and technologies that cloud has to offer is critical. Strong automation leads to higher platform velocity, which in turn enables your data team keep pace with your business needs. In our opinion, it is one of the linchpins to a truly effective EDM approach.

How Do You Implement EDM?

The best way to go about implementing an EDM is by creating a data management strategy (DMS). Creating a DMS can be time consuming, difficult and sometimes even costly. But in order to ensure your EDM is functional and effective the investment is worth it. In your strategy you need to determine the following:

1. Where your data is coming from, what type of data it is and how well matched the data you have is with what you need to know from it?
2. What are your objectives or goals as an organisation? If you don’t know how you’ll be measuring your success as an enterprise, you won’t know your destination while constructing your roadmap of enterprise data.
3. What are the policies you need to consider when gathering, storing and using data? There are multiple aspects to this one: how are you going to ensure the data’s security; what procedures are staff going to need to follow to gain access and use the data; and how are you going to ensure ethical and legal conduct while managing the data?
4. How will you deliver these outcomes at scale and speed to your end users?

There are also a few other things to take into account when putting together your data management strategy: 

How are you going to inform all of your stakeholders about the new EDM strategy and processes? It’s important to keep the entire organisation abreast of developments, so that everyone understands what the goals are, how you plan on achieving them and how they are going to be expected to engage with it.

Secondly, you need to ensure that the data you gather and use is of a high quality. If the data is no good, it’s worthless. What procedures are going to help you and your team ensure that the quality of data is maintained? 

Lastly, you need to determine how you’re going to put this all into practical effect. If you have the onsite capabilities and resources to implement Enterprise Data Management yourself, that’s great. But if not, you need to determine where you’ll find and how you’ll determine the right team with the appropriate skills in AWS and best of breed technologies that can help manage your data on your behalf.

The Versent Difference

At Versent, our aim is to help companies implement a Data Management strategy that is aligned from the operating model through to the tooling and technologies required to bring the operating model to life.  

Our Data “Yellow Brick Road” process offers a holistic approach to defining and transforming the way companies manage their workloads, to reducing costs and increasing agility and security. By combining a best practices in Data Management Strategy with our advanced, completely cloud-based data engineering and security services you can rest assured that your data management needs are in safe and reliable hands.

Our advisory and consulting teams work in partnership with our clients to achieve measurable and meaningful results for their business.

If you’d like to find out more about enterprise data management or what the Versent team can do for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

David Hanus – LinkedIn