Blog Post

Data Management: Why is it important to any organization?

Pablo Caballero • feb. 04, 2021

Data management is the practice of collecting, keeping, and using data securely, efficiently, and cost-effectively, helping organizations to make decisions that maximize the benefit.


One of the challenges that organizations face today is the optimal management of information. The digitization of internal processes and the capture of customer data makes the volume of data handled by companies increasingly robust and more difficult to manage.


This applies to all sizes of organizations and to show and understand it, let see the case of VLTV Tennis and Padel Club, located in Vinkeveen, The Netherlands.

For some time now, the Padel sport has been acquiring more and more popularity in the Netherlands. This is reflected in a considerable increase of new members in the club, since the first two padel courts were inaugurated. Because of this, the club's administration decided to build even a third padel court the last year. Currently VLTV is facing the dilemma whether to continue building more courts (sacrificing tennis courts) considering the high demand or not.


The club went from having only one type of member in the system, to now having 3 types of members:

1. Tennis Member

2. Padel Member

3. Tennis / Padel Member

 

The construction of padel tennis courts also implied a change in the club's “business” model, integrating a pay and play system for padel users.

It is at this point that it became necessary to acquire new software on top of the existing members' administration capable to deal with the new pay and play capability of the club.


So today VLTV is using 2 software solutions for the administration and with that  experienced the challenge of eliminating data redundancy between them.

In this small case (with approx. 600 members), we can visualize on a smaller scale what often happens in bigger organizations. As we well know, when data is entered by hand in an organization or lives in two separate systems, it is easy for information to be duplicated and get out of sync.


In our case data was entered in the wrong fields, typos were made and the records in both systems were not 100% aligned. At the start of using the new software there was no clear procedure how to enter new members. After a few months we implemented a new “business” rule: new members can only be entered in the system via the web form.


It took a manual effort to get both systems in sync again. By implementing this Data Management best practice we are now able to create nice dashboards instantly (like the one below) to make informed decisions for our club.


To conclude, implementing data management methods in your organization, managing scattered data in one agreed upon manner will not only help in improving data quality. It also results in potentially huge savings on resources and productive time. Better and prompt access to the organization’s data results in seamless business operations, enables the gain of trust in your data and aids in better decision-making.

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