Data management is one of the most difficult aspects of running a business. How do you turn thousands or millions of pieces of information into a coherent picture of your business and processes? The answer is through data management. Data management is a complicated process, but low-code simplifies it considerably. What is low-code data management, and how can you use it to handle your data more effectively?

Table of Contents

What is Data Management?

Elements of Data Management

Low-Code Data Management

What is Data Management?

Data management includes all of the processes and systems involved in gathering, storing and maintaining data. It requires careful planning and exceptional versatility. Ultimately, data management comes down to serving the customer and improving your business. 

The new big data trend comes with many challenges. Businesses have to ensure that their data is of excellent quality and completely secure. Additionally, you need to manage data quickly to permit the kind of agile development their business requires. 

Elements of Data Management

Successful data management involves many different elements. These include: roles, data description, access and sharing, metadata, copyrights and licensing, privacy, data formatting, archiving and data storage and security. 

Roles

There are many different people in your organization who work with data to some degree. The public relations department, HR department or sales team that manages your surveys and email lists may be one source. Your IT department may be another source. Determining what roles each person has in your data management plan (DMP) enables them to perform their duties easily and with the least amount of confusion possible. 

Data Description

Data description involves such important questions as what data you are collecting and from where, types and amount of data, etc. You need to decide what data formats you will be using. This would also be the step where you might begin to determine the relevance of incoming data to the data that you already have so that you know where to store it. Finally, you need to know and/or improve the quality of your data.  

Access/Sharing

With whom do you want to share your data, and how can you do it in the most secure way? This would be a time to determine what permissions you want to put in place for users of your data-management software or database.

Metadata

Metadata includes such things as the title, authors/creators and dates involved in the creation of data. This enables it to be easily tracked and sorted. Additionally, it permits others to better view and understand your data when you share it. 

Intellectual Property/Copyright

Data is often someone’s intellectual property, and that means that copyright laws apply. Copyright law is extremely complicated, but the most simple part involves how you can protect your data through copyright. You can apply a license that only permits very specific uses for the data. 

This category also covers the possibility of needing to transfer intellectual property rights to another company or entity so that they can use the data freely. 

Ethics and Privacy 

Many businesses deal in data that may be confidential. It is essential that you protect this data and comply with any rules and requirements that are specific to your industry. Often this will involve removing any personal identification, adding a non-disclosure agreement, and other such protections. 

Format

Formatting in the beginning is important, but so is formatting at the end of the process. Especially in the case of legacy data migration, you may need to alter the format of your data so that it is more easily accessible and shareable. They should be in a format that you can access across various platforms. Experts also generally recommend that you store data in open standard or non-proprietary formats.

Archiving

Now that you have formatted your data, you must archive it and preserve it well. You will also have to choose how long you want the data to remain archived before you finally delete it. According to The University of Arizona's data management best practices, you should retain primary data for as long as 10 years. 

Security and Encryption

You will need to backup your data on a regular basis. This can be somewhat time-consuming. 

Ideally, you should store data and backups securely in the cloud. You should also have strong cyber security methods in place and prepare to respond to data beaches should they occur. 

One of the methods you can use to keep data safe is encryption. Encryption involves the process of encoding data into an unreadable language. This is changing data from plaintext to ciphertext. You need a password or key to retrieve the data, enabling you to maintain it in greater security. 

All of these elements help to ensure more efficient cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and better overall business management through monitored and efficient use of data. 

Low-Code Data Management

Gathering, analyzing, cleaning and storing data usually takes many hours of employee time every week. Some tasks, like data integration, can take several days to weeks of work. 

Low-code is the answer to the huge time commitment proper data management requires. Using low-code data management, companies can speed up their processes. Employees can sometimes manage tasks that would otherwise require hours of hard work in just a few clicks. 

Low-code data management provides the opportunity for anyone with an elementary understanding of coding logic to perform the same tasks that would normally require hand-coding. Low-code platforms utilize drag-and-drop based programming, significantly reducing the time needed for data-related tasks. 

This is why Integrate.io offers low-code ETL software: to make data integration and data management easier than ever before. Integrate.io can not only be used by your engineering department, but also your data and marketing department because it's low-code. You can perform simple or complex tasks like data transformation and normalization quickly and seamlessly by scheduling jobs and keeping track of the jobs' status. 

Additionally, it allows users to integrate data from more than 100 data stores and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications. Integrate.io offers full documentation and support so that users can have the best experience possible. With Integrate.io, companies can go to the next level with their data management plan. For more information on how Integrate.io can help you develop the best low-code data management processes, contact us today.