How Do You Get Data into Your Company DNA? 5 Tips for Spreading Data Management Best Practices

To make the most of Big Data and analytics, data management skills must permeate your business. Keep reading for tips on spreading data management best practices across all parts of your organization.

It would be nice if sound data management required nothing more than hiring great data scientists or having the right data tools.

Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that.

Sure, having data experts on your team and a great data management toolset in your organization’s portfolio of IT resources forms the foundation for leveraging value from your data. But making the very most of your data requires help from everyone in your organization. That doesn’t mean every employee needs to get a stats Ph.D. It does, however, require you to implement some organization-wide policies and cultural values in order to brick smart data practices into your entire organization.

What does that mean, exactly? Here are some examples of strategies for helping everyone in your organization to contribute to the mission of extracting value from data:

Data quality may sound confusing. But it’s easy enough to explain what it means, even to people without backgrounds in data management.

Helping all your employees to understand the basics of data quality will provide them with a multidimensional view of big data. They’ll understand that data management is about more than just collecting a bunch of information and feeding it to a tool like Hadoop. When they realize why data quality is so important for making data useful, employees just might work a little harder to ensure that the data they help produce is as accurate as possible.

Unless the work they do benefits directly from real-time results, many employees may not realize why real-time data analytics are so important.

But this concept, too, is easy enough to illustrate. Help employees understand why real-time data is so valuable for solving real-world problems that the organization faces – and, ultimately, making their jobs better and more effective.