When you think of corporate assets, you normally think
about things like, stock inventory, cash, accounts receivable, and other things
that appear on your company’s annual financial report. While these are
important to every company, you also need to think about your employees, and
your corporate data. Your corporate data is what gives your company a
competitive advantage over your competition.
Managing your data assets is critical. In this white
paper, you will find information about security and providing accurate views of
your corporate date. This paper will explore three different areas you should
focus on when maintaining your data. The first area is keeping your data
accurate and up to date. Business decision makers cannot make good business
decisions with old and inaccurate data. By providing clean and up to date data,
you give your management the information they require to make sound business
decisions. The second area to explore is security and accessibility to your
data. If your data is not secure your corporate secrets might be leaked to your
competitors, and if your data users cannot get access to company data then your
organization may lose valuable time and revenue while your data is
inaccessible. The last thing to understand is that data needs to be usable and
well governed. You need to determine who and how your data will be managed.
Things to consider are, who are the data stewards, how will your data be
monitored, and what are the processes used to import and update your data.
Managing your corporate data is important. You need to
consider taking appropriate steps to secure, use and manage your corporate
data. You need to put controls in place to manage your data today and for the
long term. Even though data does not appear on your company’s balance sheet,
you need to treat it as your most valuable resource.
