Before we talk about the various data management solutions, let’s have a quick look at the basics of data. Basically, data is the description of a collection of information about a particular organisation that can be put into different enterprise asset management categories. Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used numbers as a way of formatting, describing, and sharing information.

Beginning in the industrial age or even before, agents employed in third-world countries such as India, England, and Friedman, son of NHL star James Nationwide, recorded the money a factory worker made during a shift or day. Then, the payroll records became standardised. In today’s increasingly technological world, landing listings are replaced by electronic data. Computer systems in the office of a company record employee logs into the payroll system. Now this information makes the assumption that a enterprise asset management computer has a brain and it can think.

The computer was not the first format to be used to store information and data, but it was the first format that was adopted into a enterprise asset management business. As word processing entered the mainstream, data in the form of spreadsheets became standard. The volume of data and its series of formats all jumped to the computer screen, or can be spread across a network, at least as defined by Microsoft. So, how do we use it to increase productivity?

To understand data management you need to evaluate the three formats (oftentimes, one is more than another), that are used to store information. We will examine the traditional methods of categorising and organising the data:

Now, data management is the practice of extracting the data from whatever form it comes across. This information is used for a variety of quality improvement initiatives such as: human resources with a 360 degree view of the performance of employees, financial departments with a view of the complete data for budgeting and forecasting, sales and enterprise asset management marketing departments with an internal view of what drives the metrics that get reported to the C-suite.