Data Management

Data management is basically the development, organization, supervision and implementation of plans or programs in regards to data; data management is a very broad field that includes anything that is relevant to the handling of data as an asset to an organization such as data modeling, data movement, and data mining. Some companies take care of their data management needs in-house while others prefer to hire other companies that specialize in data management to handle their data for them and make sure everything runs as it should.

DATA MODELING

Data modeling deals with how the data is structured and organized; data has to be organized in a way that it is easily located and accessed by all who need to use it. For data modeling to be efficient, the data must be named and categorized appropriately with data that is relevant to it; for example a database of music could be categorized by artist, by genre, or by album, so that a person needing to find songs by Kenny G for instance, can easily locate what he/she needs. There will usually be information within the structure of the data model that tells how things should be categorized to ensure that each user is aware of the structure and sticks to it to prevent confusion and chaos.

DATA MOVEMENT

As the name suggests, data movement is the ability to move data by taking it from outside sources, transforming it by selecting the parts that are required to suit the needs of the company, and then loading it to where it is accessible to the end user. This can be a very complex process and requires a lot of planning and resources to make sure things go smoothly because each bit of data has to be compatible with each other while being easy to access and understand. For example, one department may classify customers by name whereas another classifies them by number; both sets of information are equally important for each department and data movement has to be planned so that it does not affect either department.

DATA MINING

In data mining, data is sorted and analyzed to pick up on trends or patterns that can be of significance to the company; in reality, all data is collected with this purpose in mind as it is in the data mining stage that information is picked up that is used to analyze accompanies strengths and weaknesses and can make a business more profitable.

There are many other areas that data management takes in such as database administration which deals with the security, stability and performance of the data management system, data integration which deals with bringing various bits of information together into one place when they are stored in separate locations, and data warehousing which deals with how the data is stored; but from modeling to mining, the overall goal of data management is always to find the areas the company excels at and the areas that need improvement so that the weak areas can be worked on for the overall benefit and profitability of the company.