7 Tips To Better Manage Data

In this article from CIO, John Edwards writes about 7 tips that businesses can implement to better manage their data.  Edwards makes the argument that data is the most valuable resource that businesses have, and they are not investing the proper resources to manage this data.  His argument stems from the fact that data management technologies are constantly being improved, and companies who do not spend the money required to keep up with the advancing field and subsequently are putting their data at risk.
 
While I fundamentally agree with everything Edwards is arguing I think that he is only looking at this issue from the eyes of a data management technician.  For example, his first tip is to update your existing data management architecture.  With such rapid advancements in the field of IT, it is crucial that companies continue to invest money into their technology infrastructure.  However, because of the pace at which technology advances it is not always clear for management when the most recent innovation is worth spending the big money that is normally associated with new technology.  Management constantly has to be evaluating the cost-benefits of any project that they invest in, as well as the opportunity cost associated with spending that money to update infrastructure versus investing it into other parts of the business.  While I don’t disagree with Edwards's point, I do think he makes the idea that companies need to update their data architecture simpler than it is in reality.
 
Another suggestion that Edwards makes in the article is the democratization of data.  His arguments stem from the benefits of getting people the data they need in an easy and efficient manner.  While this sounds like an easy problem to fix it contradicts the point that Edwards made at the beginning of the article about data being the most important resource that businesses have.  Take a company like Google as an example.  The value of the data that Google holds is seemingly unquantifiable.  When you have over one-hundred thousand employees, it becomes a difficult task to decide who gets to see what data.  We have seen issues in the past about employees from big tech companies releasing sensitive information about internal processes of the company and how damaging that can be.  For a company as big as Google that has as much valuable data as it does, it becomes a real tight-rope act for management to decide which employees have access to what.  For Edwards to imply that granting total access to all is the easy solution to this complex problem seems to miss the importance of protecting the resource of data. 
 
While all the arguments that Edwards made in this article contain good suggestions on how business can better manage their data it will continue to be a constant struggle for companies as they continue to fight the risk-rewards of system upgrades, data accessibility, and many of the other challenges that come along with it. 

Video: Benefits of Data Democratization

Article: https://www.cio.com/article/3604333/7-tips-for-modernizing-data-management.html