Data management software (DMS) is a set of tools that aggregate data from multiple sources, then organize and structure the data in a digestible format for analysis.
Most people know that data management is essential because clean, consistent, and reliable data helps companies outrival competitors for customer loyalty and attention. Without the right data management software, you won’t have a streamlined process to analyze and activate customer data.
- Organizations must maximize the benefits of their data management software to make informed business decisions and remain competitive.
- The right data management software can save a company’s critical resources, such as time and money.
- You can use several product data management software to analyze customer data, but Amplitude’s Customer Data Platform is the first insights-driven data platform.
What is data management software?
Data management software enables you to gather data from various sources, organize it systematically, and use it for analysis.
For example, a SaaS product has many data sources, like social media platforms, CRM software, company website, and so on. This data needs to go through a few steps before you can use it to make business decisions. The unstructured data has to be extracted from the sources, transformed into a user-friendly format, and loaded into a data warehouse for further analysis. Data management software for products handles these steps.
DMS ensures companies have reliable, high-quality, real-time data for analysis that you can access at all times.
Five benefits of data management software
Data management software takes control of complex operations, including data collection, data visualization, and data warehousing. The data is converted into actionable insights and analyzed to optimize business decisions. Organizations can benefit from DMS in the following five ways.
1. Increased visibility
Data management software increases the access and visibility of your organization’s data catalog, which makes it easier to share data across teams, such as product, marketing, and finance. Everyone can quickly find the data they want, eliminating the need for data analysts to write manual and time-consuming SQL queries. DMS breaks down data silos, which improves productivity across your organization. For example, with the Amplitude Customer Data Platform (CDP), it’s easier for teams to connect and create data sources and destinations.
2. Greater reliability
You’ll have more reliable data by reducing data redundancies and data tampering.
Data redundancies are the repetition of the same data across the database. They can lead to inaccuracies and negatively affect product decisions. Since data management software limits human error, there’s a lower chance of data redundancy and inconsistency.
DMS unifies all data flows and data sets across an organization, reducing the risk of data tampering and giving teams reliable, up-to-date data. Companies can then use this data to respond efficiently and effectively to market changes and customer needs.
3. Improved data security
Data management software protects organizations (employees and customers alike) from data theft, losses, and breaches. In 2021, data breach costs jumped to $4.24M—the highest costs recorded in 17 years. DMS enforces data privacy and security with tokenization and encryption features.
Tokenization substitutes data with unique symbols to protect sensitive information. Encryption makes your data unreadable to systems that don’t have the key to decode it. Plus, with a DMS, you have an extra layer of security as you can customize the level of data access to certain employees.
Organizations must ensure that personal customer data is secure against unlawful processing and that DMS complies with data regulations and laws such as the GDPR and CCPA.
4. Increased data scalability
Data management software enables organizations to scale data with repeatable processes and workflow automation. For example, when a new product update is released, a DMS can automatically sync metadata and save product managers time.
Automating workflows with a DMS also reduces the need for duplication of queries, saving time and money as employees don’t need to rerun them.
5. Enhanced productivity
The more people in your organization that have access to data, the more people are empowered to make decisions quickly and autonomously. And the more product managers can get the answers to their questions without asking a data analyst, the faster work gets done.
When data analysts can count on product managers answering questions independently, they can dedicate time to larger projects that impact your organization. According to Anaconda’s 2021 State of Data Science survey, survey respondents stated they spend “39% of their time on data prep and data cleansing, which is more than the time spent on model training, model selection, and deploying models combined.” Freeing your data analysts to focus on deep work is critical.
Putting all your data into one system that everybody knows how to use makes working collaboratively across departments easier and more effective. It leads to data democratization and enables everyone in your organization to make data-informed decisions and build better customer experiences.
How the right enterprise data management software can save critical company resources
The right enterprise data management software reduces the time and cost associated with the following data management activities:
Data regulation compliance
Enterprise data management software ensures that your organization is automatically complying with data regulation rules. Non-compliance with data regulations can lead to penalties or, worse, governing bodies shutting your organization down.
With automatic data regulation compliance provided by a DMS, organizations don’t need to hire data protection consultants, which saves on labor and consulting costs.
Data processing
Enterprise data management software automates many data processing requests, saving time and money. Without a DMS, data must be processed manually before you can analyze it—like cleaning data in data lakes of the SQL server. This is time-consuming and expensive because it requires highly skilled personnel like data scientists and engineers.
As an organization grows and scales, so do the data processing needs. You need data management software that will grow and scale with you and your product. This is beneficial because managing large amounts of data is complicated and poses a higher risk of data redundancy.
Data storage
Handling data growth is often considered one of the largest data management challenges. Big data has changed the data storage infrastructure, and as the amount of data an organization collects increases, so do its data storage needs. Enterprise data management software offers a cheaper solution for data storage.
Most DMS offer various storage levels depending on your organization’s requirements, with pay-as-you-go pricing and subscription plans that you can upgrade anytime.
Data management software for SaaS companies
SaaS companies need product data management software that can help in three areas:
- Data governance: Ensuring that data is accurate and high quality ensures that SaaS companies can act on the data to provide a better customer experience.
- Data security: Maintaining robust data protection practices prevents regulatory issues and avoids jeopardizing the company’s reputation.
- Data integration: Integrating data across multiple systems helps companies better visualize data (via dashboards and data modeling) and activate it (via product analytics and customer engagement) in downstream tools. Learn more about what technologies it takes to collect and activate data in our post on the Modern Data Stack.
Data management software examples include Amplitude Customer Data Platform (CDP), IBM Master Data Management, and Oracle Customer Data Management.
Amplitude CDP
Amplitude CDP is the first insight-driven customer data platform. This data management software is built for data, product, and marketing teams to leverage insights for decision-making. Organizations can take advantage of the expansive integrations, including the ability to track and run targeted marketing campaigns with customer engagement tools like Intercom and Braze.
With Amplitude CDP, analyzing data is easy for marketers and product managers because there’s no need for SQL queries. Organizations can build dynamic and predictive user segments and automate data activation. An all-inclusive DMS like Amplitude CDP means that you don’t have multiple vendors managing different aspects of your data management processes, saving you both time and money.
Watch the Amplitude CDP demo to learn more about Amplitude’s data management software, or request a personalized consultation.
