What is data management?

Data management is the practice of collecting, processing and using data securely and efficiently
for better business outcomes.

72% of top-performing CEOs agree that competitive advantage depends on who has the most
advanced generative AI. However, in order to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI),
organizations must first organize their information architecture to make their data accessible and
usable. Fundamental data management challenges include data volumes, and data silos across
multiple locations and cloud providers. New data types and various formats such as documents,
images and videos, also present challenges. Also, complexity and inconsistent datasets can limit an
organization’s ability to use data for AI.

As a result of these challenges, an effective data management strategy has become an increasing
priority for organizations to address challenges presented by big data. A flexible, modern data
management system integrates with existing technology within an organization to access high-
quality, usable data for data scientists, AI and machine learning (ML) engineers, and the
organization’s business users.

A complete data management strategy accounts for various factors, including how to:

 Collect, integrate and store data from diverse sources—including structured and
unstructured data—and from across hybrid and multiple clouds.

 Maintain high-availability, resiliency and disaster recovery of data stored across multiple
locations.

 Build or obtain fit-for-purpose databases to meet a variety of workload and price-

 Help ensure sharing of business data and metadata across organizations, to enable greater
self-service, collaboration and access to data.

 Secure and govern data, while helping meet compliance requirements and meeting data
privacy requirements.

 Manage the data lifecycle from creation to deletion with end-to-end integration,
governance, lineage, observability and master data management (MDM).

 Automate data discovery and analysis with generative AI for data management.

Why data management is important

For example, a generative AI-driven commentary was offered during The Championships
2023 at Wimbledon, which accessed information from 130 million documents and 2.7
million pertinent contextual data points in real time. Visitors using the tournament app or
website were able to access complete statistics, play-by-play narration and game
commentary, as well as a precise prediction of the winner at any moment as matches
progressed. Having the correct data management strategy can help ensure that valuable data
is always available, integrated, governed, secure and accurate.

Transforming data into a trusted asset

Generative AI can give organizations a strong competitive advantage, with their AI strategy
relying on the strength of the data that’s used. Many organizations still struggle with
fundamental data challenges that are exacerbated by the demand for generative AI, which
requires ever more data—leading to yet more data management headaches.

Data might be stored in multiple locations, applications and clouds, often leading to
isolated data silos. To add even more complexity, the uses of data have become more
varied, with data in varying and complex forms—such as images, videos, documents and
audio. More time is required for data cleaning, integration and preparation. These
challenges can lead organizations to avoid using their full data estate for analytics and AI
purposes.

However, equipped with modern tools for data architecture, governance and security, data
can be successfully used to gain new insights and make more precise predictions
consistently. This capability can enable a deeper understanding of customer preferences and
can enhance customer experiences (CX) by delivering insights derived from data analysis.
Moreover, it facilitates the development of innovative data-driven business models, such as
service offerings reliant on generative AI, which need a foundation of high-quality data for
model training.

Creating the right data foundation for digital transformation

Data and analytics leaders face major challenges when transforming their organizations due
to the increasing complexity of the data landscape across hybrid cloud deployments.
Generative AI and AI assistants, machine learning (ML), advanced analytics, Internet of
Things (IoT), and automation also all require huge volumes of data to work effectively.
This data needs to be stored, integrated, governed, transformed and prepared for the right
data foundation. And to build a strong data foundation for AI, organizations need to focus
on building an open and trusted data foundation, which means creating a data management
strategy that is centered on openness, trust and collaboration.

The AI requirement was summed up by a Gartner® analyst1: “AI-ready data means that
your data must be representative of the use case, including all patterns, errors, outliers and
unexpected emergence that is needed to train or run the AI model for the specific use.”

Data and analytics executives might feel that AI-prepared data equals high-quality data, but
the standards of high-quality data for purposes other than AI do not necessarily meet the
standard for AI readiness. In the realm of analytics, for instance, data is typically refined to
eliminate outliers or conform to human expectations. However, when training an algorithm,
it needs representative data.

Ensuring governed, compliant and secure data

Data governance is a subset of data management. This means that when a data governance
team identifies commonalities across disparate datasets and wants to integrate them, they
will need to partner with a database architecture or engineering team to define the data
model and data architecture to facilitate linkages and data flows. Another example pertains
to data access. A data governance team might set the policies around data access to specific
types of data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). Meanwhile a data
management team would either provide direct access or set a mechanism in place to
provide access, such as adjusting internally defined user roles to approve access.

Effective data management, including robust data governance practices, can help with
adhering to regulatory compliance. This compliance encompasses both national and global
data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), along with industry-specific privacy and
security standards. Establishing comprehensive data management policies and procedures
becomes crucial for demonstrating or undergoing audits to validate these protections.

Data governance and metadata management

Data governance promotes the availability and usage of data. To help ensure compliance,
governance generally includes processes, policies and tools around data quality, data access,
usability and data security. For instance, data governance councils tend to align taxonomies to help
ensure that metadata is added consistently across various data sources. A taxonomy can also be
further documented through a data catalog to make the data more accessible to users, facilitating
data democratization across an organization.

Enriching data with the right business context is critical for the automated enforcement of data
governance policies and data quality. This is where service level agreement (SLA) rules come into
effect, helping ensure that data is protected and of the required quality. It is also important to
understand the provenance of the data and gain transparency into the journey of the data as it
moves through pipelines. This calls for robust data lineage capabilities to drive visibility as
organizational data makes it ways from data sources to the end users. Data governance teams also
define roles and responsibilities to help ensure that data access is provided appropriately. This
controlled access is particularly important to maintain data privacy.