Flexible data management is the process of establishing and maintaining information structures that are responsive to business demands. This allows organizations to better adapt to changing business environments, increase access to information and aid in decision-making by providing the most current and accurate data.
The need for flexibility is becoming increasingly important as companies are struggling to keep up with the fast-changing business environment of today. The old adage, that the only constant is change is for modern businesses and if a business’s information infrastructure isn’t up to date with evolving needs and strategic objectives it will soon become obsolete.
Flexibility is essential to ensuring that businesses can efficiently utilize their information assets to gain competitive advantage. This can be done by implementing new methods of monitoring the health and integrity of data pipelines and individual data pieces (known collectively as “data observability”) which aid in identifying and address issues before they impact the data’s security or quality. This method provides an automated, proactive method of managing data, which reduces the requirement for human intervention and speeds up problem solving.
Flexible data management also allows teams to share and access information. Marketing may track and remediate risks in a different fashion than IT. However both approaches can be combined into a single report that is simple to read and can be communicated to the senior management of the organization. This is possible with tools such as data federation, business glossaries and metadata-driven information dictionary.
