The Business Leader’s Guide to Strategic Data Management

Data is the lifeline for businesses of the modern era. With the rightful use of data, businesses can lead in the competitive market and bring productive opportunities. But utilising data doesn’t imply using every data that you get your hands on. There is a need for strategic data management, which will help you filter out the essential insights for your business’s growth.

Alongside that, several data within the organisations are sitting ideally without being used. Either the organisations don’t know they exist or are unaware of how to use them. Therefore, if you are in a dilemma of using data to your best business advantage, this article is here to educate you on its strategic implementations.

What is Strategic Data Management?

Strategic data management is the process businesses execute to collect, store, use and analyse data to achieve their business targets. There are four types of data that businesses collect for productive assessment, which include:

• Descriptive data
• Diagnostic data
• Predictive data
• Prescriptive data

Descriptive data define buyer personas, keyword reports, historical assessments and target audiences. On the other hand, diagnostic data is an insight that explains why something has happened and how it can be improved or maintained.

Predictive data is about helping businesses predict what the future will be. This data set will help make forecasts and possible outcomes of specific operational or marketing executions. In contrast, prescriptive data is about evaluating certain variables to decide what further steps can be taken to improve the customer experience and generate more sales.

The Continuous Cycle of Strategic Data Management

To help you understand this better, strategic data management is a consistent implementation cycle. There is a specific path that you ought to follow to ensure that the set data will help you in all stages of your business operations. Here is the stepwise cycle that businesses should follow with strategic management of data:

• Measuring the worth of collected data for organisational success. With the right set of tools and assessments, you can be sure of how actionable data can be.
• Moving forward, you need to assess your current capability of breaking down the data into productive growth implementations. You need to identify the data management aspects you follow currently and pick out the loopholes to fix them.
• Address the data management gaps and develop certain actionable plans to overcome them. Your approach should be toward seeing improvements in the utilisation of data.
• Set the measurement parameters to determine how successful your strategic data management approaches are. Based on that, you can predict the business improvements you will acquire by implementing those approaches.
• Execute those improved plans on all fronts of your business, and make it count.
• Keep testing the existing data management strategies and prepare yourself for future initiatives. It will help you stay updated with the data management and analysis trends and assess your customers more profoundly.

Benefits of Implementing Strategic Data Management for Your Business

With the right enterprise data management rules, your business can easily access all crucial insights. A clear plan makes it easy for the employees to drive their focus on improving the pain points and not wander around the bush with limited and outdated information.

Some of the benefits that you would experience in implementing strategic data management are:

• Better Productive Insights

When you can organise the data proficiently, you are making it widely accessible among your team. Your trained and skilled team will have better clarity on mining for critical actionable insights from that data and lead your business to make wise decisions for growing the business.

• Faster Response to Change

Business environments change rapidly, and as a business leader, you must adapt to them as quickly as possible. The success of your business depends on this ability! If you respond too late to the market shifts, your competitors will take a whopping advantage of it.

Organising and managing the data strategically will allow you to identify the rapid changes in market activities. Following that, you will be able to respond to those demands for a change immediately. As a result, you won’t lose out on your earning potential.

• Cost Efficiency

With the right strategic data management approach, you can save a lot of money in the long run. Your employees won’t be digging deeper to extract the same data from various resources in different formats, saving you time and cost.

Keeping a proper tab on the collected data will help the employees access it anytime, whether from the cloud or in-house servers.

• Enhanced Data Quality

The accuracy of decisions made to improve business operations and marketing approaches relies on the accuracy and quality of data. When you have a solid plan for executing data quality management, you can ensure that data integrity is not hampered while collecting, storing or utilising it.

• Stay Ahead of Your Competition

With proper data management, you will always be ahead of your competition. When you have access to the right set of data and insights all the time, you can determine what your customers expect from you, even before the trend hits the market. Hence, this will help you implement personalisation for your marketing campaigns to acquire more sales.

Steps to Implement a Perfect Strategic Data Management Approach

Now that you understand data management and its importance to the core, it is time you learn the steps to implement it. Here they are:

Step 1: Identify Your Business Objectives

Picking the right set of data to collect, store and use is one of the important aspects of strategic data management. If you are not moving forward by keeping business objectives and data management in alignment, you will waste your time and resources. Probably, you will be dealing with the wrong sets of data!

Determine the critical use cases of specific data for fulfilling your business objectives. Hence, this will help you start building a proper data management strategy and executing it.

Step 2: Introduce Data Management Processes

The data management processes include collecting, analysing, storing and governing data. Pick your data sources, and determine if you need structured, unstructured or a combination of both types of data. Following that, enable the data collection process, whether manually or through automated scheduling.

Once collected, you must set up the procedures for cleaning and transforming raw data for proper analysis. Identify the complete and incomplete data sets, determine guidelines to name them and add metadata for easy accessibility.

Go ahead and store your data securely in your desired format. Next, assign the teams to collaborate and analyse it to derive actionable insights.

Step 3: Look Out for Right Technologies

With a proper data management strategy, you will need efficient tools and solutions to make it more productive. Take the help of experts to determine what hardware or software solutions you might need to build a strong data infrastructure.

You will need tools for some of the following data management tasks:

• Integration support for office processes and tools
• Automation for repetitive tasks
• Enhancing security for critical data
• Dashboard for a unified view of all selected data and actionable insights

Step 4: Constantly Monitor the Strategy

The final job you need to do is to ask your team to constantly monitor how well the strategy is functioning and help the business excel. Over time if its effectiveness is lost, you must use the measurable metrics to determine the same and adapt best practices to improve the data strategy.

Let Weavr Bring All Crucial Data and Actionable Insights for a Better Assessment!

One of the tools you would need to implement your data management strategy is a unified dashboard to view all data and actionable insights at your convenience.

You can also use Weavr to boost your overall business success. You can track your marketing results and compare your periodic performance. If you are inching towards implementing intelligent data management solutions, then Weavr can be an integral part of it.

This is all you need to implement strategic data management and make worthy decisions for your business’s success in the long run. Data is the key to understanding your customers’ perspectives in today’s era, so you don’t want to misguide yourself and your team by wrongly utilising it. Hence, to ensure you stay ahead in the competition, bring in a productive data strategy and make it work.