Quick Data - Data Management Consultants

What is Data Management?

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Data management is the practice of organizing and maintaining data processes to meet ongoing information lifecycle needs. The emphasis on data management began with data processing, but data management methods have roots in accounting, statistics, logistical planning and other disciplines that predate the emergence of corporate computing in the mid-20th century.

It’s the implementation of policies and procedures that put organizations in control of their business data regardless of where it resides.

Data management is concerned with the end-to-end lifecycle of data, from creation to retirement, and the controlled progression of data to and from each stage within its lifecycle. If done correctly, data management minimizes the risks and costs of regulatory non-compliance, legal complications, and security breaches. It also provides access to accurate data when and where it is needed, without ambiguity or conflict, which avoids miscommunication.

Any kind of business data is subject to data management principles and procedures, but it’s particularly useful in rectifying conflict among data from duplicative sources. Organizations that use cloud-based applications in particular find it hard to keep data orchestrated across systems. Data management practices make sure that data conforms to organizational best practices for access, storage, and back up.

What are the benefits of data management?

The benefits of data management include enhanced compliance, greater security, improved sales and marketing strategies, better product classification, and improved data governance to reduce organizational risk.

The right data integration solution helps you break down data silos and address data problems while giving you a plan for the future. 

With data integration solutions from solutions like QuickData’s, you can:

  • Boost productivity. Get more mileage from existing resources – and increase your productivity – by working from a single point of control. You’ll quickly and easily access the data you need.
  • Share more of the workload. An intuitive interface means you can entrust data to business users, giving them more control so you can get back to your own tasks at hand.
  • Be confident your data is ready for action. Auditing tools that monitor processing and source data lineage let you know your data is primed and prepared for the next step.
  • Access the data you need. With read, write and update access capabilities to more than 60 data sources, the data you need is always at your fingertips.

QuickData is a data management consulting firm focused on helping organizations cut down on inefficiencies within their operations. We teach you how to optimize your revenue by providing you a state-of-the-art automation program aimed at solving business problems related to data. 

Stop the Search: Manage Your Data Correctly

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Data management can be intimidating but don’t let that hold you back. Learn to manage it correctly; and your data will work for you in amazing ways. 

Add a data base management system (DBMS) to your business, and you have taken a first step to improving production, securing your research, increasing your marketing potential and streamlining your processes. A data management system can be required to receive many grants or to win government projects. 

When it comes to data management, here are six preliminary questions to ask.

  • What data do I collect?
  • Do I follow a process for collecting and documenting my data?
  • Who contributes data–just me or others, too?
  • What format is the data in?
  • Where is the data stored?
  • Is the data being backed up?

Compare the following suggestions to your own data practices. Take steps to improve the weaker areas of your company, then you are on the right path of success.

Documentation – Document the processes and workflows you follow when collecting and managing your data in a README file. It’s important to follow standards within your field for documenting contextual information about your data. 

Formats – Ideally, data should be stored in open, non-proprietary formats. This ensures that data is easily accessible well into the future. This can be done simply by saving files as a CSV instead of an Excel spreadsheet or a text file instead of Microsoft Word document.

Storage – IU offers several options for data storage. You can store your data on the Cloud through IU Box, which also provides excellent versioning and collaborative functionality. Whatever you do, make sure you back up your data and not just rely on your hard drive to keep it safe. Also note that these options do not ensure long-term preservation.

Sharing and Access – Consider storing data in IUSW to promote discoverability and access when appropriate and necessary.

Security – Make sure you have a plan in place to prevent security breaches. Outside of organizing your data correctly, this is the most important step you will take. 

Whether you need to generate reports, track inventory, review past invoices or simply make a quick decision, you can do so with a database management system. 

Database management systems make businesses and organizations faster and better. It can be intimidating to move all of your data over, but rest assured that it will be worth it. QuickData is a data management consulting company focused on teaching you how to cut down on operational inefficiencies aimed at solving business problems related to data. 

Gathering customer service data doesn’t have to be hard.

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Gathering data is like pulling together ingredients for a very nice dinner. You shop, you carry home your groceries, and you take things out of the pantry to create a memorable dish.

Similarly, data must be researched, collected, and brought together to create a memorable and accurate matrix of the ebb and flow of your company. 

Using data to understand your customers really isn’t as complex as you think, but it does require a thoughtful analysis of where and how you collect meaningful data. By defining which aspects of customer behavior are most significant to your business, you can measure and analyze better ways to engage your customer and ultimately increase your business and sales.

The second part of gathering accurate data is learning how to map it to your financial data. 

Customer data and financial data are two different things, and they are kept in different places. You will likely have to do a lot of cleaning to get good analytics, but you can’t create useful reports unless you have clean, accurate data.  

Once you have a handle on the data available, you can then create a key matrix. To do so, you need to know what you are analyzing and why. Are you comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges? 

Remember, customer data is anything you want it to be — contact information, purchasing and payment history, demographic information, psychographic information and even social media updates.

Resist the temptation to keep track of everything in a spreadsheet. In fact, you shouldn’t even use a spreadsheet! You need a proper database or customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

Next to your company’s financial data, your customer data is the lifeblood of your company. If you lose it, the damage can be irreparable. 

The five best practices for customer data management include:

  1. Choose critical data carefully.
  2. Don’t collect it all at once.
  3. Clean your data.
  4. Validate your data.
  5. Keep your customer data secure.

Does Your Data Provide an Accurate Roadmap?

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No matter what type of business you are in, you have data and it’s important! 

But like many companies, your data may be scattered and located in a lot of different places – which is a big problem and the number one reason you need a data management firm. 

Data that’s undiscovered or not clean, hurts the health of an organization. It prevents you from understanding what is working, what is not, and what you need to do better. 

Getting a grasp on your data is critical to your success and planning for the future. Getting it right makes all the difference. Here are some critical questions to answer:

• Where is all the data that’s relevant to your business? 

• Can you access it quickly when you need or want it? 

• Do you know if it’s accurate, current, clean and complete? 

• Can you easily pull all the data together, no matter what format it’s in or how often it changes?

If you answered “no or not sure” to any of these, you need data management. Data is the foundation to every decision your company will make. You simply can’t function optimally with corrupt or missing data and you certainly can’t use it for analytics. 

Here are five best practices that will prepare your data for analytics. 

  • Simplify access to traditional and emerging data. More data means better predictors – bigger really is better when it comes to data used for business analysts. Access to more data makes it easier to determine which data will best predict an outcome. 
  • Strengthen the data management arsenal with advanced analytic techniques. QuickData provides sophisticated statistical analysis capabilities. Our analysis identifies outliers and missing values that can skew data. 
  • Shape data using flexible manipulation techniques. Preparing data for analytics requires merging, transforming, de-normalizing and sometimes aggregating your source data from multiple tables. We use reshaping transformations like frequency analysis, appending data, partitioning and combining data, and multiple summarization techniques.
  • Share metadata across data management and analytics domains. A common metadata layer lets you consistently repeat your data preparation processes. This promotes collaboration, better productivity and flexibility. 
  • Scrub data to build quality into existing processes. With a data quality platform designed around data management best practices, you can incorporate data cleansing right into your data integration flow. 
  • Analytics is the hottest IT topic – Remember: Underlying analytics is data. Don’t underestimate how important it is to do data right!

Quick Data is a data management company that prepares clients for growth and success. Data management is just one of the ways that we do this. We teach your company to cut down on inefficiencies and how to optimize your revenue with a state-of-the-art automation program that uncovers and solves data related problems. 

Data Management: A Critical Key to Success

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What is your company’s greatest asset? Your staff, your marketing team, your knowledge process? All of these are extremely important, but your single most important asset is your data. 

Data drives everything. So, the obvious question is: do you understand yours? Is it correct, clean, and organized in a way that others can immediately access it, read it, and use it so your company reaches its maximum potential? 

It’s no longer enough just to manage your data. It must be streamlined to reach its full potential and it must be protected. Data is the driving force behind every successful organization. 

Since data is your most valuable resource, questions you must consider include: 

Is your data easy to access, clean, integrate and store? 

Do you know which types of data are used by everyone in the organization? 

And do you have a system in place for analyzing data as it flows into your organization? 

Brush up on the following concepts before you start your data management journey:

  • Data access refers to your ability to get to and retrieve information wherever it is stored. Certain technologies make this step easy and efficient, which means you spend more time using the data — not just trying to find it. 
  • Data integration defines the steps for combining different types of data. Data integration tools enable you to design and automate the steps that do this work.
  • Data quality is the practice of making sure data is accurate and usable for its intended purpose. This starts from the moment data is accessed and continues through the various integration points with other data. 
  • Data streaming involves analyzing data and then applying logic to the data. It includes recognizing patterns in the data and filtering it for multiple uses as it flows into your organization.
  • Data federation is really virtual data integration. It allows you to look at combined data from multiple sources without the need to move and store the combined view in a new location.
  • Data governance is an ongoing set of rules and decisions for managing your organization’s data to ensure that your data strategy is aligned with your business strategy.
  • Master data management (MDM) defines, unifies, and manages the data that is common and essential to all areas of an organization. Master data is typically managed from a single location or hub. 

The QuickData Platform with the ideal data journey in mind and is structured for fast and accurate results. It’s designed with IT and business collaboration in mind, and it’s ready to transform your analytics programs into big opportunities. 

Taking Advantage of Cloud Data Management

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In the past, companies typically centralized data and locked it safely away in an impenetrable vault. But hoarding data doesn’t allow you to extract value from it and this can add up to financial costs and missed opportunities. 

Data only has true value when it’s available to be leveraged.

The Cloud is a dream for expanding companies, it allows them to click a button and have access to virtual machines that allow users to copy data and put it away—regardless of where you are located. 

It removes the need for your company to have hardware and the need for people who understand hardware. 

But you do need a team to make sure your data is accessible and stays in place. 

Most companies have a solid cloud data management strategy and that begins with five important considerations:

Date Storage – Data often sits in storage. It’s often behind firewalls and other layers of security, which it should be, but it’s also vital to ensure that your stored data is encrypted. Properly encrypted means anyone stealing it will end up with lines of garbled junk that they can’t decipher. 

Accessing data – Your employees need to do their jobs and should be able to access data whenever and wherever they want, but access must be controlled. Create tailored access rights and controls that restrict unnecessary access.

Data in Transit – Create a secure, authenticated, and encrypted tunnel between the authenticated user and device and the data they’re requesting. Never compromise security. Make sure data remains encrypted in transit, so no interceptor can read it. 

Arriving Data – When the data arrives at its destination, make certain that it is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with. 

Backup and Recovery of Data Today, most companies recognize the importance of proper backup hygiene and have implemented backup and recovery processes. Be sure to actually test and validate your ability to restore the backups and recovery periodically.

These five pillars will bear the load of your company data and withstand the forces. Make sure you can quickly recover from the most common issues that come from operating in cloud environments. 

How Do You Increase Your Profit: Do it with Better Data Management

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Statistician Edward Demming said: “In God we trust, everyone else bring data!” 

Data reveals the heartbeat of your company. It also uncovers a lot about your business—what works and what doesn’t. It can tell you if your company is healthy or slowing down. Or it can uncover problems that need to be addressed immediately. 

Armed with reliable data, you make decisions that could make or break your profit line. You hold steady knowing that you are on the right course and you end up on top.

Data-driven insights yield results. Without the ability to track and analyze decisions as well as your customers’ behaviors, your business will fall behind. This is why data management and analysis is a powerful tool to reveal where your company is in the market place and where it needs to go. 

Here are six areas where analytics is being used to transform the performance of companies like yours. 

Better Fulfillment Analyzing data gives the highest probability of successful fulfillment.  Missed shipment and frustrated customers erode top and bottom line profitability. 

Improved Service Performance Having the correct data allows you to predict your ability to meet company goals, commitments, and client demands. 

Improved and Effective Marketing Want the best return on your investment? Quick Data’s system shows you how to optimize your marketing investment.

Maximize Customer Value Clients, who know they’re valued, do repeat business. Understand your data and what it tells you about your clients and you’ll see your profit margin grow. 

Drive Down Costs Turning the analytical focus inward helps to significantly improve staffing level forecasts so you can manage operational costs.

Better Product Management Data is used to ensure the company targets the right product at the right time, increasing sales.

Get Started with Quick Data! Our approach is to provide a thorough analysis of your business and arm you with the tools necessary to increase profitability without additional IT resources. 

Tapping into the Power of Data Management

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The longer a company is without vital updated information, the more cost a business incurs.

Management of the business across all departments comes to a standstill when data is not accurate or is missing because it is spread over too many systems.

Companies miss out on billions of dollars a year in revenue because the process of gathering data is unnecessarily held up. Leaders can’t move ahead because they do not have timely and accurate data.

This is why more and more companies turn to data management consulting firms to provide the insight they need to be efficient and successful, but gathering the right data is complex and confusing. 

Three ways that these firms assist companies with data inefficiencies:

  1. Consolidation of Data Across the Enterprise: Facts, figures, numbers, and documents spread over a multitude of databases and separate systems that aren’t integrated through a data management strategy pose a huge problem. Data management consultants teach you and those within your organization how to cut down on inefficiencies while offering a solution to optimize your revenue.

Efficiency begins with a state-of-the-art automation program that is solely aimed at solving business problems related to data.

  1. Determining Data ROI: Today, the average U.S. business spends about 2.5 percent of their annual revenue on digital marketing alone. Factor in alternate marketing channels, and businesses are now spending an overwhelming sum of money promoting their products. The ability to understand ROI is of growing importance.

Without an efficient data management system in place, your company will miss opportunities to gain an accurate view of the customer base, performance, and other valuable insights. By simplifying data, businesses greatly improve their ROI, while reducing overhead costs.

Data management platforms provide businesses with advanced data analysis, that leads to smarter business and marketing decisions. With a better understanding of your data, you can refocus your marketing efforts, optimize your results, and generate more leads—all while spending less.

  1. Implementation of Data Tools: Most businesses have the tools in place to simplify data analysis, but those often come in the form of expensive software programs that need to be installed on every computer. The installation process can be tedious, and as the company grows, businesses need to continually install software for every new employee.

With a cloud-based data management platform, the software exists in the cloud and can be accessed on all devices. This eliminates the labor and cost of implementation, while making it easy to scale your software needs to accommodate your growing staff.

Data Management always begins with education. At QuickData this is the first thing we do—we educate our clients about how they can run more efficiently. We provide the tools to solve tough data management problems, while tailoring data solutions to your company’s needs so you can move your company forward efficiently.

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