As discussed in previous blogs, many more company executives have come to recognise the importance of data as a valuable business asset and have invested in the data quality management systems needed to maintain and exploit that value for the long term strategic benefit of the business. In many cases this has meant developing a new set of fundamental core competencies across the organisation to bake-in the requirement for a data quality mind-set into the corporate DNA.
While this is clearly a good thing, it can also result in a significant increase in the day to day workload for individual users in order to ensure that data standards are not allowed to slip. By its nature, data can quickly exceed its use-by date and needs to be continuously maintained and monitored to remain fit for purpose. This can be both tedious and time consuming particularly when it comes to mundane tasks such as data cleansing.
One answer could be to hire more specialist staff to deal with the problem but that pre-supposes that there is a pool of candidates with the right skills and experience willing and available to fill any vacancies. However an alternative and more cost effective approach could be to consider the growing trend of Augmented Data Management to automate and reduce many of the routine data management tasks by as much as 45%, according to the leading business analysts at Gartner.
Augmented data management helps to eliminate many of the manual time consuming house-keeping tasks associated with maintaining data quality in large datasets such as highlighting any patterns and anomalies or automating data quality monitoring, freeing up expensive specialist resources to focus more on data analysis to support strategic business-critical decision making.
In addition to automating data quality tasks, augmented data management also provides a powerful tool that can be applied across the range of essential management tasks including for metadata and master data management, data integration as well as database management systems, by users with lower technical skills and experience (and at a lower cost). However it is important to note that while ADM can significantly reduce their work load it will not fully replace the need for skilled data specialists who are able to bring an expert’s analytical perspective to ensuring the highest data quality standards are maintained.
The case for adopting an augmented data management approach is growing in direct correlation with the increasing volume of data that most businesses are now having to handle and brings with it some significant cost saving and strategic revenue generating benefits. By eliminating many of the essential but tedious tasks it enables you to maximise the productivity of data management team by working smarter not harder. This not only generates greater job satisfaction for the individuals concerned but can also have a knock on effect on the quality of their work through the reduction of potential boredom induced errors and lead to better informed management decision making.
Augmented Data Management can also help to tame unorganized data and ensure that it is maintained in line with corporate policies and procedures over time to create a trusted source of business critical information on demand to keep your business agile in a competitive environment, essential to support sustainable profitable growth.
At IDS through our automated iData solution we can provide businesses with the full range of data management tools and services based on extensive hands-on experience working with all types of businesses and public sector organisations.
iData leverages augmented data management methodologies to cover all the routine data quality assurance tasks including data cleansing, data deduplication, data transformation and migration, data mapping and secure data for non-production environments to deliver 100% businesses data certainty with added data protection. If you want to know more about how augmented data management can help your organisation cope with the growing data mountain workload we would be happy to arrange an initial discussion.