Ippon Blog

The Pause for Perfect Part 2: Top Tips to Approach Operations without Ideal Data Management

Written by Steven MacLauchlan | May 8, 2024 12:30:00 PM

Data management is a critical aspect of modern business. It ensures the efficient and secure handling of data and helps organizations integrate new solutions, like artificial intelligence (AI), by playing a crucial role in driving operational excellence.

According to a recent AI webinar, for example, nearly every global executive thinks that AI will be key to their strategies in the coming three to five years - but at the same time, corporate data also needs to be adjusted for AI by leveraging an approach that incentivizes better data by looking at the validity and value of data from the various sources.  This includes a need to check for data credibility, which often includes the traceability of the data to its origins.

In many ways, this study, and our approach at Ippon, is to dive deep into examining the “lifecycle” of your data in order to ensure that we not only understand how it’s created, moves through, and is accessed within the organization, but also determine how effective the data will be in helping you accomplish your business goals.

Getting to Better Data

Here are some essential tips for effective data management:

  1. Plan Your Data Management Strategy: How will you collect your data? How is it stored and where? Who has what kind of access to what kinds of it? How long will it be retained? What is the perception of data quality across different business units? These are a few critical questions you should track and answer to gain a baseline understanding of what issues to tackle first. Partnering with an organization like Ippon Technologies can help you develop a clear plan that outlines your data management current state and desired future state- We’ve helped dozens of companies of different sizes and tech stacks navigate these waters and achieve their goals
  2. Standardize Early and Often: From data entry to alignment with IT security and other business functions, it’s essential to implement consistent data standards to ensure data quality. This includes using consistent formats, validations, and protocols across your enterprise.
  3. Choose the Right Solutions: At Ippon, we work with our clients every day to optimize their data tooling and platforms to help ensure their data is effectively managed.  The goal is to find the best approach to data management, without breaking the bank.
  4. Focus on Data Quality: We work closely with our clients to ensure they regularly review and clean data to maintain its accuracy, value, and validity. This includes removing outdated data, or data that is duplicate or corrupted and ties back to standardization.
  5. Ensure Effective Data Access Management: By implementing role-based access controls you can ensure employees and systems only access data necessary for their roles. This includes integrating a capability to monitor and update your data Management Practices including regularly reviewing and updating your policies to accommodate new data sources, technologies, and business needs.

By implementing effective data management principles like these five tips, you can help achieve operational and organizational excellence and drive better decision-making in your organization in a way that reduces risks, and costs, and delivers cleaner revenue.

Stay tuned next time when we explore the third and final topic around how to best refine and improve data management practices over time and the numerous benefits this approach carries. For more information read our latest eBook The Future of Data Management.