Essential Factors When Choosing a New Data Management Tool
Digital disruption in the exploration and mining industry is creating greater business insights and highlighting opportunities. To be competitive you need to turn these insights into action based on analytics with data you can trust.
With data being the most important asset in your business, there are some essential factors to consider when you are choosing a data management tool.
Data sources and formats
When considering a data management tool, handling a range of data sources is fundamental. Ideally, all of these data sources will be loaded via automation into your database. Quality, accuracy and security of data is a high priority. You should have confidence that your data management solution has integrated and automated functionality to manage and audit your data.
Data storage and access
Regardless of where data is stored, the more important factor is access. Data needs to be readily available to end users to make business decisions. Too often data is siloed and person-dependent for access. Cloud-based tools that provide permission-based access to data are a far better business solution.
Data analysis and visualisation
An ideal data management tool will have data analysis and visualisation functionality as a module. However fundamentally, if the data tool has quality data then any data analysis/visualisation tool can be integrated e.g. PowerBI. The right tool for a business will thus also be dependent on skill availability.
Data governance and compliance
Data governance and compliance should be integral to your chosen data solution. Ideally, they should be customisable to meet industry, jurisdiction and business requirements. Protection from loss of data, such as backup, is not the function of the data tool but the IT environment where the data tool is stored.
Here’s what else to consider
The important question to ask when reviewing a data management solution is how it will make your life easier. It will be easy to implement, low maintenance, scaleable, readily available and have ongoing development to increase functionality. Cost is a factor that should be reviewed, keeping in mind how much time would be spent managing the data without implementing a data tool.
Also, the likely lost opportunities for business improvement by not having data analysis and visualisation must be a consideration.