Introduction

You’ve sensed it, you’ve read it, you’ve seen it. Reliable, well-managed data is critical to organizational success in the twenty-first century. Whatever sector you work in – financial services, health care, insurance, manufacturing, technology, retail, education, and beyond – your organization requires data to transact business and serve customers. This data not only fuels your business processes; it also provides you the business intelligence needed to measure organizational success. As importantly, the data your organization produces can be mined for insights about current operations—insights you can apply to improve your processes and advance your organization’s strategy.

But reliable data is not produced by accident. In today’s complex world, well-managed data depends on planning and design, governance of business and technical processes, and the commitment of your organization to high-quality results. It also means ensuring that information about customers, products, and business operations is kept safe and secure, so that it cannot be used for criminal or malicious purposes.

Reliable data depends on successful execution of the functions and activities that comprise the field of data management. These are described in detail in DAMA International’s Data Management Body of Knowledge (known as the DMBOK2). Understanding the breadth and depth of functions that make up data management can be daunting. At first glance, they can appear quite complicated (see Figure 1).

Navigating the Labyrinth: An Executive Guide to Data Management gives you a perspective that reduces this complexity. Based on the DMBOK2, it provides a high-level overview of how data should be managed to support organizational success. It also explains what can get in the way of this success. Understanding the principles and best practices for data management will help you identify and act on your organization’s opportunities to get more value from its data.

The first four chapters provide an overview of data management:

• Chapter 1: The Importance of Managing Data – Explains what data management is, and how managing data as an asset can help your organization.
• Chapter 2: Data Management Challenges – Outlines why managing data differs from managing other assets and resources.
• Chapter 3: DAMA’s Data Management Principles – Explains principles of effective data management that will help you overcome the challenges presented by data; introduces the concept of evolving your organization’s data management practices based on a maturity model.
• Chapter 4: Data Ethics – Describes the principles underlying an ethical approach to data management; explains how this approach to data handling can help prevent your organization’s data from being used in ways that harm your customers, your reputation, or the wider community.

The next four chapters review the mechanics of managing the data lifecycle:

• Chapter 5: Data Governance – Explains the role of data governance in providing oversight for data; highlights the ways an organization can implement governance practices to make better operational and strategic decisions about data.
• Chapter 6: Planning and Design in the Data Lifecycle – Describes the role of architecture and data modeling in data management, and the importance of planning and design in managing the overall lifecycle of data.
• Chapter 7: Enabling and Maintaining Data – Provides and overview of activities related to obtaining, integrating, and storing data and enabling its currency and access over time. These activities include applying design concepts to create reliable, performant, and secure warehouses, marts, and other data storage environments, where different types of data can be integrated and made available for a wide range of uses.
• Chapter 8: Using and Enhancing Data – Describes the ways that data can be used to create new data to bring value to an organization. Data enhancement adds both value and complexity to the data lifecycle. It requires organizations to plan for and cultivate the organic growth of data.

The following three chapters cover the foundational activities required to help build trust in data and ensure the organization can get value from its data over time:

• Chapter 9: Data Protection, Privacy, Security and Risk Management – Describes how to manage risks related to data, especially those connected with potential breaches or malicious uses of data.
• Chapter 10: Metadata Management – Provides an overview of how to manage Metadata, that critical sub-set of data which contains the knowledge required to use and maintain the rest of your data.
• Chapter 11: Data Quality Management – Presents techniques for ensuring that your organization’s data is fit for its intended purposes and enables your organization to meet its strategic goals. These techniques apply the principles of product management to data, and are aligned with the principles of data management described in Chapter 3.

Each chapter concludes with assertions about what you need to know about these topics. Chapter 12 What to do Now concludes the book with an approach to re-directing your organization’s data management practices through a current state assessment, a defined roadmap, and a commitment to organizational change management.

DAMA recognizes that to most executives, data management can seem obscure, complicated, and highly technical. You don’t have time to learn all the detail or cut through the hype. But if your organization depends on data – and most organizations do – then you have a critical role to play in enabling success. Reliable data management takes organizational commitment, and organizational commitment comes from leadership. DAMA hopes that by navigating the labyrinth of data management, you can develop opportunities for your organization to get more value from its data. This book will explain the fundamentals and help you understand why they are important, so you can focus attention on how to build trust in your organization’s data through efficient and effective practices.