Data Management is a key factor in an information management strategy. Data management will examine the content of the larger databases and the data they house rather than the applications which they’re running on. As CRM systems are now set to include the whole process of data governance. The whole life cycle of any given piece of data will be tracked and recorded from its initial creation all throughout its use and then its deletion or archiving.

Content management is a more recent concept in information management. Any unstructured data would be categorised through your content management. Out of all the data within any given organisations on average around 85% of it will be unstructured. Unstructured data is anything that isn’t held in a specific template or application and is typically word and excel docs as well as online and email content. As more data is passed around virtually and cloud computing continues unstructured data is set to increase.

Business intelligence looks at the more formal data your organisation gathers. The underlying principle of business intelligence is being able the data produced from your business and use it to benefit your organisation. That information is usually gathered and stored in a data warehouse. An example of this could be asset tracking software. By tracking your fixed assets you can pin point who is responsible for them as well as their depreciation. The business benefit derived from this would be the money saved in not having to replace fixed assets prematurely.

The data gathered from tracking only from a single source perspective is called master data management. An example of this would be the tracking the sale from one customer and noting where they came from and the end result as this would mean you’d be able to track whether that sale came from a sales lead or a marketing lead.

The easiest way to determine whether you have clean accurate data is to look at your decision making process within your organisation.

Tags: data, information management, IT

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Data Recovery, hard drive recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.