In this era, with increasing dependence on data to make more informed business choices, optimize business decisions, reduce cost and improve marketing campaigns, the importance of data management is becoming glaringly obvious. Data management is basically collecting, keeping, and using data securely and efficiently at minimum cost. If you are still not convinced about its importance, here are some of its undeniable benefits
- Increases productivity: Productivity is a key to the success of any company, and if data can be accessed easily in an organized manner, the productivity and efficiency of the company increase exponentially. Moreover, it makes it easy to access past correspondence and prevents miscommunication due to messages lost in transit.
- Smooth operations: Good data management system ensures a seamless operation thus making sure your company stays at the top of the competition.
- Reduce security risk: Nowadays, with the huge amount of personal data that can be accessed with just a click, it is really important to ensure data security. A data breach is a major issue that severely hampers the growth of the company.
- Cost-effective: If you have a good system in place, you will spend less money trying to fix problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. Another benefit could be the time and money saved from wasting on information that already exists; thus reducing cost in the long run.
- Minimal chance of data loss: You need to prepare yourself for sudden glitches or system failures. A good data management system does just that. It ensures that even if data is lost, it can be retrieved easily, thus, reducing risks of losing important information.
- Better decision making: With organized data at your fingertips, the chances of making wrong decisions reduces tenfold.
We would have expected at least famous companies to understand the importance of data management. But they too, were the victims in numerous cases. The following are some of the major companies and organizations that fell into this trap.
NASA: In 1999, NASA took a 125 million dollar hit when it lost the Mars Orbiter. It turns out that the engineering team responsible for developing the Orbiter used English units of measurement while NASA used the metric system. Just a minimal inconsistency of data resulted in a rather costly and disastrous mistake!
ENRON: It was once one of the most powerful and largest companies in the world. The early 2000s saw jaw-dropping executive compensation and soaring stock prices of Enron. However, a host of fraudulent financial data led to the downfall of the company. The data delivered by Enron’s executives and their auditing firm to stockholders and the Board of Directions in annual reports and financial statements turned out to be false. This could have been prevented by an ethical external auditing firm at Enron.
PAYPAL: Just because of the failure of adequate screening and thus preventing certain illegal transactions, PayPal had to agree to pay USD$7.7 million (£5.1 million) to the US government. It was found that nearly 500 PayPal transactions, worth almost $44,000, violated sanctions that ban US companies from doing business with individuals or organizations on a blacklist.
SONY PSN: During April of 2011, in one of the largest data security breaches in history, Sony suffered cyber-attacks allowing the criminals to hack their PlayStation Network. Sony was forced to close its PlayStation Network for around 24 days due to the hacking of more than 77 million accounts, and they suffered a loss of about US $2 billion.
Spending time and resources collecting data and business intelligence, only to lose or misplace that information which will cause not only a huge inconvenience but can also put your whole business at stake, would absolutely be a terrible idea.
Statistics show that 93% companies filed for bankruptcy within one year of losing their data centre, and 50% companies filed for bankruptcy immediately after going without any data management for a period of about 10 days.
Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly easy to manage your data with companies like K2View at your fingertips. Such companies specialize in organizing your data efficiently, which results in better functioning and saved time.
In conclusion
Every company deals with an enormous amounts of data every day. Therefore, processing it all manually is a bit unrealistic. Thus, investing in an effective data management system is not an option anymore. This has become a necessity. After all, we should remember that it’s always better to be the company that is smart enough to learn from others’ mistakes and not the one whose mistakes teach others the lesson. Better to be safe than sorry.
