Building Blocks of Effective Data Management
Building Blocks of Effective Data Management
Data Management
ITEC79
Three Pillars of Data Management
INTEGRATION
● Organize your data into logical domains that make sense to your business
such as customers, products, and services.
● Furthermore, you can add enrichment data to further paint a clearer picture of
your customers, products, and services and their relationships.
Secure Data:
● A mix of governance and security allows you to establish security rules and
then implement those rules.
● First, you must determine how you will manage your sensitive data.
● Next, you must find and assess the risk of your sensitive data and implement
rules via policy and technology.
● This process is very important but prone to be under-addressed by those
inexperienced in big data management.
Explore and Analyze Data:
● Implement a data laboratory to perform experiments with a clear business
goal in mind.
● Based on your hypotheses, find what data exists and how it can be analyzed
to create a model that delivers results.
● Then determine if the results are beneficial to the business; remember that
providing actionable information and processes is the goal.
● Develop best practices to enhance agility and processes before pushing the
solution into the factory.
Explore and Analyze for Business Needs:
● Test out data products to see if they provide a real value for the business;
often you just need to try something to see if it works.
● It is common to use A/B testing to determine if a new data product adds value
to the business.
● Make iterative improvements over time as you learn what works, what
doesn’t work, and what can be improved.
Operationalize the Insights:
● It is not a saying to say “a company’s greatest asset is its people”; it’s the
truth.
● The challenge is what can be done to increase their effectiveness and ability
to produce results, and in this context in working with big data.
FIRST
● Understand the role and needs of each team member or category of
member.
○ There will be a mix of data scientists, modelers, analysts, stewards, engineers, and business
users, all with different perspectives, skill levels, and needs.
○ Some will require greater self-service autonomy (in the laboratory environment), while others
require operational agility (in the factory environment);
● Your job is to identify their needs within the big data environment.
SECOND
● Incorporate the three pillars of big data management into the team members’
operating principles and environment.
● Using a disciplined approach, ensuring that in particular governance and
security processes are followed, is one of the biggest favors you can do for
your team.
● Not having governance policies enabling hassle-free access to data will
doom your team to needless headaches negotiating access to needed data.
SECOND (cont.)
● Failing to have necessary security controls in place also adds to data access
issues, but worse yet it opens up the risk the team could be associated with a
data breach.
● Make sure your team understands the value of governance and security and
uses it to their advantage.
THIRD
● Get help for your team in terms of training, effective technology, outside
experts, and vendor experience.
● Odds are your team is already overworked;
○ why make them do things the “hard way” by denying those tools and expertise to increase
their effectiveness?
● Forcing your team to work in isolation without of the great work already done
with big data will send the team down a path of one-off, custom solutions,
manual processes, and tedious work that is not reproducible.
THIRD (cont.)
● That DIY approach results in frustration for the team and costly lost
opportunities for the business.
FINALLY
● Consider what you can do with what you already have by creating
repeatable, automated processes and standardized technologies.
● Rather than re-inventing the wheel and expending resources for each new
project or dataset, seize opportunities where you can:
○ Reuse existing infrastructure and tools
○ Reuse skillsets, expertise, and processes
○ Reuse previous projects’ components
FINALLY (cont.)
● Working big data projects is initially complex work, but when quality big data
management principles are followed, that work can be reused again and
again to the benefit of the team and the business.
● Taking steps to empower your big data staff isn’t just right for them as
employees, but it yields benefits for the company as well.