Meaning of Unified Data Management
UDM refers to the process of combining disparate data sources into a single source of information, stored in a data warehouse. It combines people, processes, and technology to address both the data-silo model that has evolved over time and the huge amounts of information organizations process.
Organizations have historically grown their software systems on an ad-hoc basis, installing different programs and data management techniques as they have expanded. This results in a disparate structure with duplicate tools and data that serve the same purpose. Data is siloed, disintegrated across teams and areas, and little to no sharing is possible. As a result, businesses lose business insight and trend analysis, and costs increase.
In what ways does UDM drive business?
UDM encompasses both strategic and technical aspects. In order for UDM to be successful, it must align its upgrade of the organizational data management framework with the business objectives.
Two requirements should be met by UDM:
1. Ensure that disparate data management principles are coordinated:
Data management teams collaborate and integrate development efforts, and server, network, and code artifacts are interoperable. Different teams can also share data management architecture and infrastructure components. A unified centralized data repository will require merging the individual data management teams for the disparate source systems/applications into a single lean team that can handle data quality, integration, management, and governance functions.
2. Contribute to the achievement of strategic business goals:
An organization should be able to utilize its corporate datasets to extract business insights and channel this information to support its goals through UDM. A business should first identify and prioritize its goals, and then communicate the data-driven requirements for achieving those goals to the technical data management team. Consequently, UDM has evolved from being a technical data integration framework for organization-wide data to an alignment framework between data management and information-driven business strategies. The unified data framework is only successful when it serves the strategic business goals of the organization.
How does Unified Data Management benefit you?
1. Reduces information overload: Data is everywhere. From social media, reviews, videos, and external sources of information to internal purchase data and customer data collection, organizations generate and consume huge volumes of data. Every day, businesses deal with terabytes of data, which can be completely overwhelming for both people and systems.
2. Insights and Trends: A primary goal of unified data management is to provide accurate trend analysis and business insights. Through unified data management, data is transformed, cleaned, and made usable for insights. In addition, it arranges the data in a way that makes it more accessible and usable. By using data and business insights, agile innovation is enabled that would not have been possible otherwise.
3. Reduced Costs: The following are some of the ways in which unified data management reduces business overhead costs: