Your guide to enterprise data management with Tabular

Our world is run by data: there’s more of it than ever before and it is endlessly expanding in every form. The increasing necessity to implement enterprise data management is not because of herd mentality or a fad, there are real operational needs driving the data movement. Prime among these is the urgent need to make data accessible and useful. Organizations should be able to put their data to fueling work decisions, empowering efficiencies, and shaping the company direction. Data must be effectively standardized, converted, and stored where it is secure but still easily available to users.

Unreliable data leads to generating incorrect insights which lead your business in the wrong direction in the long run. This is why dealing with data should be your main priority if you want your organization to digitally transform in a meaningful way, truly become data-driven, and find ways to accurately monetize its data. Through employing Enterprise Data Management (EDM) with Tabular, you can lay the foundation for achieving your business goals and aspirations.

What is enterprise data management?

Enterprise data management is the procedure of organizing, standardizing and centralizing data in order to produce excellent insights that improve a company’s decision-making process and overall use of data. EDM involves a wide spectrum of activities directed toward organizing a company’s data as a whole. This requires a detailed knowledge of your company’s structure and internal and external work processes. Tabular is focused on a set of operations, practices, and activities across the entire data lineage process.

How can data management help your business?

Establishing a well-defined Enterprise Data Management framework like Tabular basically means defining and enforcing rules and regulations that will unify the way your business uses data across all its processes. Effective standardization across an enterprise is critical for various reasons. This involves automating workflows for every business process within the enterprise.

EDM designs data pipelines for each enterprise data type: metadata, reference data, master data, transactional data, and reporting data.
EDM identifies data structure definitions for each dataset used: the user can automatically have the information about the type of data in it.
EDM ensures that all business rules are valid and implemented in the right places within the process of transforming data into the final product.

What are the main elements of enterprise data management?

Like any complex system, your company’s EDM system is made up of a myriad of smaller subsystems, each of which play a unique role in creating the final data product. Each of these play a vital part in your EDM system. Such as: data governance, data architecture, and data warehousing.

Data Governance is the foundation of EDM and is directly linked to all the other subsystems. Its purpose is to establish a good enterprise data management strategy. This includes the creation of fundamental documents that define policies, procedures, roles, tasks, and responsibilities throughout a company. Ultimately, these regulations ensure key business values are achieved.

Data Architecture creates instructions that guide you through the process of data collection, integration, and transformation, as well as data modeling. The chief reason of setting up a functional data architecture is basically structuring and securing the operational environment in which the data will be stored and manipulated. Data security also plays an important part here.

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence represent the analytical core of an Enterprise Data Management system. Data warehousing reorganizes input data into a format that is most suitable for data analysts who are looking to create reliable data insights. BI also empowers end-users with these vital insights, enabling them to make smarter data-driven business decisions.

How do you define a good enterprise data management strategy?

There is no single enterprise data management strategy that works for every business. Each company needs to define its own strategy based on unique needs. However, there are a few best practices you can implement and some questions that should be answered when designing an effective EDM strategy:

Evaluate your current EDM system: Gather and analyze the information related to your company’s characteristics, activities, and business targets.

Which subsystems does the system consist of and how are they connected?
What are the inputs and outputs of each and every subsystem?
Where are obstructions that slow down the data flow process?

Define your data products: Gain a clear understanding of your end goals and what you wish to achieve by using EDM in your company.

What are the products that you wish to have as final outputs?
How do you want to utilize the final data products?

Establish business standards, policies, and procedures to implement data governance:

Identify work activities that a company needs to implement in order to support the production of high-quality data products
Define regulations for each subsystem and activities within your company
Decide on how to perform the implementation of each identified activity

Define teams and their responsibilities:

Allocate activities to particular teams or departments
Define vertical and horizontal hierarchy across the organization
Determine individual responsibilities present within a team

Execute a flexible data architecture system:

Decide on which hardware and software you plan to use
Identify definitions of data structure or format of data to be collected and disseminated
Automate data processes by creating data pipelines

Communicate with your employees and your partners, keep all parties up-to-date always:

Educate colleagues about technological, structural, and system updates
Notify external partners about new standards and procedures that may affect them
Building an EDM system for long-term success

Diligent maintenance of data and data processes is crucial to every company’s success. The right implementation of an enterprise data management system helps your business make smarter, data-driven decisions and it can also make it easier to integrate the insights from the data into your products. Tabular can be used to standardize your data and work culture, improve both your internal decision-making processes and communication with your partners, and save you time and money.

With all business components accounted for, it is possible for your company to execute a high-quality data management strategy that can take your business into new dimensions. For more information on how Tabular can automate your workflow better than ever before, please get in touch with us or go through our website and send us your questions. Dive into digital transformation with Tabular today!