Data Management

In our day-to-day life, it is important to handle lots of situations where we do need a proper arrangement and management of data. It’s always easier to access things in an arranged room than a messed one. Like this, arranged data helps us ease our accessibility and save our time. In this article we will learn about data management including data recording and data organization.

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What Does Data Management Mean?

• Data can be defined as a set of or collection of names, figures and numbers that convey information. 

• This information can be about anything. Data is generally made based on various observations and analysis. 

• We can record data as well as organize data in different formats such as tables, charts, pictures, etc.

What is a Database?

• A database can be defined as a set of data that is organized. Database is generally the collection of tables, schema and other entities. 

• Data is basically organized to a reality model that supports processes that need  various information.

Why is Data Management Important?

1. Data Management is Important to Minimize Errors:

• Effective data management will always help us in minimizing potential errors and reducing the damages that is caused by bad data. 

• The greater occurrence of various processes like drag and drop, copy-paste and linking of documents, the greater is the chance of data errors. Therefore, an effective data management strategy and data quality initiative will help in better control of the health of a business’ most valuable asset.

2. Data Management Helps in Improving Efficiency :

• If your data is properly managed, updated, and enhanced, the accessibility and the organizational efficiency of the data will increase exponentially. 

• If the data is inaccurate, mismanaged then it can lead to the wastage of tremendous time and resources.

3. Data Management Aids in Protection from Data Related Problems and Risks:

• Security of data and proper data management is very essential as it helps in ensuring that the important data is never lost and the data is protected inside the organization.

• Data security is an important part of data management as it protects employees and companies from various data thefts, losses and breaches.

4. Data Management Helps in Improving the Quality of Data:

• Better data management aids in improving data quality and data access. Therefore, better search results can be easily obtained in a company with better and faster access to the data of the organization’s, which can help in decision making.

What is Data Integration?

• A database management system can be defined as a software application that interacts with other applications and the user and the database itself to analyze the data.

• The main purpose of the Database Management System is to define, create, update and administer the databases.

• It can be defined as the combination of technical and business processes that can be used to combine data from various sources into valuable and useful information. 

• Isolation provides trusted data from various sources.

Suppose let’s take an example to illustrate how to record and how to organize data and what is their significance.

Solved Examples

For example: In a refugee camp, there were a total of 75 people of different age groups. A NGO came to sponsor food packets for them. But people in different age groups tend to take different types of food like the infants take milk while the adults take bread buns. The Management has to know the exact count of requirements for all the adults as well as the infants.

In the above case, asking each person about what they eat is impossible as it would consume a lot of time. We need to handle this situation in less time, how? This can be done by Data Management.

Here are the Steps to Manage Data:

The steps involved in data management are as follows -

Step 1: Recording the Data

The first step of data management is recording or in simple words collecting the data. Here, the table shows a total of 75 refugees, now you need to divide them into four groups of infants, kids, adults and of course old-age. Now take the count of each group.

Now we know the number of people who take milk and the number of people who take bread buns.

Step 2: Organization of Data

Followed by the recording, we know that the organization of data is done. Now, we need to arrange the data we have collected so that we can easily access the information from a much larger and arranged data. Above situations can be arranged in a better way. You can see one of the ways below:

Here we used the symbol “I”  for every person making the choice and every fifth mark is used as a strike that is I = 1 and IIII equals 5. This method seems to be an effective way of representing data. Hence, data can be easily recollected whenever required.

Types of Data

Data handling methods can be performed based on the types of data. The data is generally classified into two types, such as:

1. Qualitative Data

2. Quantitative Data

Qualitative data can be defined as something that gives us descriptive information about something whereas quantitative data can be defined as something that gives numerical information about something. Here, the quantitative data can be further divided into two. They are discrete and continuous data. The discrete data can take only certain values for example whole numbers. The continuous data can take a value within the provided range.