Many firms find themselves in a couple states of spreadsheet swamp, a dark forest of databases (lots of data but no data management), and a homegrown data platform that is lacking or requires too much maintenance — these are just some of their obstacles.

Although firms may want a complete system overhaul to solve these issues, the financial costs, resource demands, and time constraints often make such a transformation impractical. Instead, a strategic, phased approach to enhancing existing data management systems offers a feasible path to modernization. Incremental improvements and optimizations with a strategic vision can address immediate pain points without the risk or cost of a full-scale system replacement. Small, chunked improvements with a vision can get smart organizations to the point of making a full-scale replacement possible, while realizing increasing business value consistently during the journey.

Let’s explore several key strategies for enhancing data management systems, including incremental augmentation, data quality improvements, standardization of data models, strengthening data security, and implementing efficient data governance processes. The goal is to provide organizations with actionable insights to modernize their homegrown data management systems in a controlled, cost-effective manner.

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Key strategies for strengthening data management systems

Rather than attempting a massive overhaul, you can adopt a strategy of incremental augmentation to modernize homegrown data management systems. This approach focuses on making small, iterative improvements to existing infrastructure rather than ripping and replacing entire systems. With this strategy, you can implement new features and technologies gradually, allowing your organization to scale operations at a manageable pace – and discover value along the way while confronting issues while they are small.

One of the most significant advantages of this approach is the ability to leverage cloud-native data platforms. These platforms offer the flexibility to scale resources based on actual demand, enabling businesses to avoid the capital-intensive costs associated with traditional infrastructure upgrades. Where you start your journey and the path you take will depend on your biggest challenges.

Example: Consider a company that is struggling with data quality issues across its legacy systems. Instead of completely overhauling their infrastructure, they can integrate a modern data platform capable of performing real-time data validation. This solution can be incrementally rolled out to specific areas of the business, such as data entry or reporting. Publishing data into a modern data platform and implementing the data quality checks there, where data lineage is clear, allows source systems to fix issues, while downstream systems get a natural benefit. As a result, the company achieves better data accuracy without disrupting ongoing operations or requiring a costly full-scale system replacement.

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Integrating data quality checks

Data quality is paramount in ensuring that insights and decisions are based on accurate, reliable information. Poor data quality—manifesting in missing values, duplicates, and errors—can severely undermine the effectiveness of a company’s data-driven strategies. To combat this, organizations should embed automated quality checks within their data management systems. These checks should be designed to detect and resolve inconsistencies, identify missing values, and flag erroneous data before it propagates through the system.

Achieve this by employing a range of tools and techniques aimed at improving data quality. Data profiling tools can be used to analyze datasets and identify patterns or anomalies. Automated validation processes can cross-check incoming data against predefined quality standards to ensure that data meets acceptable thresholds. Additionally, regular data cleansing routines should be implemented to maintain the integrity of the organization’s data over time.

Tools and techniques: Data profiling, validation, and cleansing tools are vital for ensuring data integrity. By implementing these tools, companies can enhance the accuracy and reliability of their data, making it more useful for analytics, reporting, and decision-making. Automated quality controls, combined with manual audits, can ensure that the data remains consistent and error-free across the system.

Standardizing data models

As organizations grow and diversify, they often accumulate various operational systems that store and process data in different formats, at different granularities, and targeted to their operational use – not a wide data usage plan. This fragmentation can create silos, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights or integrate data across systems. To resolve this issue, firms should focus on standardizing their data models. Standardization ensures that data is stored in a consistent format, enabling seamless integration, analysis, and reporting across systems. However, it is going to be impossible to quickly get every source system to implement a consistent model. An incremental, strategic approach gets results where the task is herculean otherwise.

A step-by-step approach to data model standardization can significantly ease the transition. Begin by identifying core data entities, such as reference data, transactions, and holdings — then defining their relationships across different systems. In a modern data platform, multiple sources can be normalized to a firmwide data model. Choosing a platform with guidance on existing data models allows you to avoid the pain of negotiating every decision as an organization. Once these key data models are established, organizations can work to align readers of existing datasets with these standards.

Step-by-step standardization: Firms can create a standardized data model by mapping existing data structures to a unified framework. The process begins with identifying common data entities and their relationships across systems. Once this foundation is established, published datasets can be progressively aligned to the standardized framework for downstream readers, ensuring consistency across the entire data architecture.

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Strengthening data security

Data security is incredibly important, tough to implement correctly and one of the foremost concerns in any data management strategy. It’s hard to be in charge of data security because it’s a trade off with work the firm needs to get done. As your teams do their work, it is tempting for data to move around the organization when security isn’t seamless and then it can end up under the wrong eyes with the wrong controls on it. As businesses handle sensitive information, they must adopt stringent security measures to protect against data breaches, unauthorized access, and theft. It’s smart to make the secure path the easy path. Create a blessed data source with fine grained access controls. Make sure it’s easy to connect to so there are no reasons to copy sensitive data somewhere else. Now you can establish all new use cases to read from the blessed source and begin transitioning any readers of the old sources to your data platform. The Chief Information Security Officer can finally work on those deep breathing routines outside of work hours.

Technical approaches

Several technical measures can be employed to enhance data security. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is an effective method of ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific data sets, rows or columns. Encryption, both at rest and in transit, protects sensitive data from being intercepted or exposed. Additionally, data masking techniques can be used to obscure sensitive information, reducing the risks associated with data exposure.

By implementing these measures, firms can significantly reduce the chances of a security breach while also ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations.

Implementing a data layer for seamless transition

One of the most challenging aspects of data modernization is ensuring seamless integration between legacy systems and newer technologies. To manage this integration, organizations can implement a data layer that acts as an intermediary between disparate systems. A data layer abstracts the complexities of underlying data structures, providing a unified and consistent view of data across the organization.

Technical implementation

Technologies such as data virtualization and integration platforms can facilitate this transition. Data virtualization allows organizations to integrate data from various sources without physically moving it, providing real-time access to information across the entire organization. Data virtualization helps when you cannot extract but puts load on original source systems for all queries. Alternatively, if you are committed to modernization, you can materialize your unified consistent data in a modern platform. These platforms also enable businesses to abstract away the complexities of different data sources and systems, allowing for more efficient data management.

Strengthening data governance, lineage, and cataloging

Effective data governance is essential for maintaining accountability, transparency, and compliance. You want to know who is responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of any data in your platform. Ideally, there is just one owning group or person. Organizations must track the flow of data from source to destination to ensure that it is being used appropriately and in compliance with relevant regulations. Maintaining audit trails and data lineage records is critical for demonstrating regulatory compliance, especially in industries with stringent data privacy laws.

Best practices

Implementing data lineage tracking, metadata management, and data cataloging enables organizations to gain a clear understanding of how data is being used and transformed across systems. Data lineage tools provide visibility into the journey of data, from creation to final usage, helping organizations ensure data integrity and compliance.

Creating custom schemas and reports

One of the primary benefits of modernizing a data management system is the ability to create custom schemas and reports that are specifically tailored to the needs of specific parts of the business. Not every part of a firm thinks about data the same way – and the same inputs can be presented in many ways. Custom schemas allow flexibility to structure the data in a way that best fits operations and analytical requirements. Likewise, customized reports provide valuable insights that are not available through standard reports, giving a competitive edge in decision-making.

Intuitive reporting tools

No one wants to wait for a report. They know what the data should look like, they know roughly what they are looking for. It’s important to remove the barriers to getting knowledge or getting data quickly. Leverage intuitive reporting tools that consolidate data from multiple sources. These tools allow business users to create dynamic reports with real-time insights, enabling faster decision-making. Use drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-built templates, and automated workflows to make reporting more accessible, empowering non-technical users to generate value and perform analysis independently.

Conclusion

A strategic, phased approach to enhancing homegrown data management systems offers numerous benefits, including reduced risk, cost savings, and improved data integrity. By implementing an incremental augmentation strategy, organizations can address current data challenges while preserving the stability of their existing infrastructure. Coupled with a focus on data quality, standardization, security, and governance, this approach ensures a comprehensive and sustainable modernization of data management systems.

Organizations that embrace these strategies will be well-positioned to extract actionable insights from their data, enhance operational efficiency, and drive informed decision-making. We encourage businesses to assess their current data frameworks, identify key areas for improvement, and adopt these best practices for long-term success.

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Matt Katz