Guide to Enterprise Data Management (EDM)

Using data requires planning, strategic thinking, and processes that help refine and give meaning to your data and ensure you’re building on the right insights. 

This is the idea behind enterprise data management or EDM. Enterprise data management is the strategies, processes, and tools your organization uses to gather, transform, store, analyze, govern, regulate, share, and build on your data. Companies utilize EDM to create a data-driven culture where everyone can trust the data they’re utilizing and expand access so that even those unfamiliar with back-end data processes can still multiply their impact using data in their roles. It creates informed decision-makers at all levels and helps build more efficient business processes across your organization. 

Let’s look at how companies manage enterprise data (or data gathered from across the organization) and its impact on their businesses. The first step is understanding the components and building blocks of EDM. These glossary terms are all part of the process, and incorporating each step or tool ensures companies have a strong foundation for their data strategies: 

• Data Governance: This framework defines how data is managed and used within the organization. 
• Data Integration: This process involves combining data from different sources to provide a holistic view of questions and answers. 
• Data Quality Management: This step ensures data accuracy, completeness, and consistency. 
• Data Storage: This refers to where data is stored — on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud—and in what format—raw or transformed. 
• Data Security: This includes encryption, access controls, and other measures to safeguard sensitive information.
• Data Architecture: The design of how data is collected, stored, processed, and accessed within an organization. 

Using EDM means your company will actually benefit from your data. With clean, well-governed, and accessible data, your company can make informed decisions, develop better operational processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and create consistent experiences throughout your organization. 

These benefits can ultimately lead to cost savings and revenue growth. Ready to get started? Let’s dive into how enterprise data systems help companies grow. 

Why is enterprise data management important?

Today’s businesses won’t get far without data. Even if your company isn’t ready to invest in EDM, many of your competitors have and will continue to make investments in their data, giving them a critical advantage in the market. Data helps organizations of all sizes better understand market trends, customer behavior, internal processes, and how to achieve objectives. 

Without an EDM strategy, companies will struggle with getting the most value out of their data. They’ll encounter inefficient and resource-hogging processes that often create bottlenecks and overwhelm team members trying to manage data access. They’ll run into siloed data where departments or business process owners keep their data in individual systems and don’t see the big picture holistic combined data provides. These missed insights and opportunities can create greater data disparities across business functions.

Enterprise data management helps solve these problems by improving access to high-quality and accurate data across your organization. Here are some of the ways EDM does this: 

• Standardizing data processes: EDM ensures that data is collected, formatted, and stored in a standardized way, reducing errors and inconsistencies. 
• Data governance: EDM requires your organization to understand and build on a strong foundation of data governance. This way, all departments follow the same policies and standards, reducing data silos and creating a unified view of your data.
• Enhanced data integration: Because you’re analyzing, organizing, and strategizing about data from the beginning, you’re able to seamlessly integrate data sources in a way that makes sense for your business. 
• Automated data processing: EDM allows you to thoroughly analyze your data upfront and set up automatic processes to ingest, store, and manage that data in a way that works for your future needs. Because these processes are automated, your company can more easily scale with higher volumes of data and more complex data analysis needs in the future. 

Key components of enterprise data management

Enterprise data management doesn’t have to look the same at every company. Some organizations prioritize one component over another, while others may add additional layers of security or data architecture to ensure their EDM best meets their needs. However, some key components of enterprise data management should be a part of any company’s EDM. 

Data governance and data stewardship
Data governance serves as the foundation of any data management strategy, establishing the policies, procedures, and standards that ensure data is accurately managed and compliant with regulations. It assigns clear roles and responsibilities so everyone understands their role in maintaining data quality and usage. Data stewardship works alongside data governance by defining the roles and policies of data usage daily, ensuring team members have ownership and data is handled correctly throughout its lifecycle. 

Data integration and data quality management
When you bring in data from all over your organization, you need processes and strategies to integrate that data and provide more comprehensive intelligence. Using integrated data gives teams the power to act on a more complete picture of current trends and insights. For your team members to be able to confidently analyze and act on data, you need to ensure high-quality data is the foundation for all data processes. EDM needs to ensure you have accurate, reliable, useful, and valid data so business users can continue to trust the data they’re working with. 

Data security and compliance
Security is a critical component of all business data. While some industries have more strict regulations on data security for things like personal health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), or financial data, every company should be focused on keeping its data secure from unauthorized access. This safeguards your data and confidential company information and can help build and maintain customer trust. Using EDM to ensure compliance means your company is adhering to legal and regulatory requirements, protecting the organization from penalties and ensuring ethical data management practices. 

Enterprise data management (EDM) vs master data management (MDM)

One term you might hear when discussing data strategy is master data management or MDM. While MDM has some similarities to EDM, they are different concepts. Both refer to how you manage data and rely on data governance, quality, and integration to ensure you get the most from your data tools available. 

However, while EDM is a strategy that broadly focuses on managing data across your entire organization, MDM is more focused on maintaining key data sources. For example, MDM focuses on ensuring master data like customer or product information is clean and accurate and able to be shared, rather than looking at all data produced across different systems. 

MDM is focused on maintaining a single, consistent source of truth in one area. Companies that deploy MDM realize benefits from focusing their efforts. They choose the 10% (or whatever number makes sense to them) most impactful data and focus 90% of their effort on that data, ignoring the rest. EDM takes time to look at all data sources, analyze what data in each is useful, how to best utilize it, and strategize how to transform, store, analyze, and share that data. 

Benefits of enterprise data management

Want to start building a business case at your company for why an enterprise data management strategy will be worth the time and effort to build it? Consider the following benefits: 

Improved decision-making and business agility
Your company knows having data at the right stages of decision-making will be transformational, so showing how EDM’s data strategy supports this goal can be powerful. EDM ensures there is high-quality data available to support business objectives. This leads to better-informed decision-making, allowing businesses to respond swiftly to market changes, customer needs, and internal challenges. With high-quality data at their fingertips, business users at all levels can confidently make strategic decisions and adapt more quickly to evolving business environments.

Enhanced data visibility and accessibility
By creating strategic processes around your data, you can make data more accessible across the organization and remove bottlenecks in decision-making processes. With clear data governance and permissions in place, anyone can access the data they need right when they need it. This way, teams can collaborate more effectively, ensuring everyone works from the same, accurate data. And having accessible data ensures your team can support real-time analysis and reporting, leveraging data more effectively.

Reduced operational costs and risks
When everyone has access to the data they need, you can see where processes can be streamlined and risks can be better mitigated. Utilizing EDM helps eliminate inefficiencies and redundancies within your data processes while deploying that data to analyze other processes further. And, because you’ve strategically approached your data management, your data will be cleaner, more secure, and comply with regulations. In the long run, these benefits will compound each other, creating a more cost-effective business operation.

How to prepare for an enterprise data management strategy

As you work to answer questions at the beginning of your process, you’ll be able to create a data foundation that will serve your current and future EDM needs. 

1. What data am I working with? You need to assess your current data landscape by categorizing your data sources, evaluating data quality, and understanding how you want to use each data source. 
2. What goals will my data help achieve? As you define goals that align with your business objectives, you’ll be able to ensure your data is working in the same direction you are and measure the success of your current iteration of EDM.
3. How will we manage data governance? Not all data can be shared with everyone, and you’ll need to have a solid governance structure established defining ownership, access, roles, and permissions. 
4. What tools do we need to achieve our data objectives? Some companies piece together their enterprise data management strategy using multiple tools for each stage of the process, from collection and transformation all the way to embedding data reports in systems. Other tools, like Domo, manage the entire lifecycle of data. Decide which tools will best support your goals. 
5. What regulations do we need to manage for our data? Depending on data types, there may be compliance requirements to consider. Personally identifiable information will need to be encrypted and not available to view in some analyses. Make sure you understand all the regulations around the types of data you want to work with. 
6. How will we ensure we will continue to work with high quality data? Establish processes and data quality controls that will help your team have continual confidence that they’re working with accurate and clean data. 

To thrive in today’s data-driven landscape, implementing an effective enterprise data management strategy is essential. By prioritizing data governance, integration, and quality, your organization can unlock valuable insights that lead to informed decision-making and operational efficiency. Ready to elevate your data strategy? Explore how Domo’s comprehensive solutions can empower your business to harness the full potential of your data!