Many companies use a collection of tools to collect, store, analyse and manage data related to customers, products, marketing and other aspects of their businesses. Professionals responsible for data management can use such tools to minimise potential errors and help businesses make data-driven decisions. If you want to improve your data management skills, learning about various categories of tools may be useful for you. In this article, we define data management tools, explain their categories and share a list of tools that data management professionals often use to view, manage and analyse business data.
What are data management tools?
Data management tools are the software and equipment that businesses may use to store, analyse, manage and distribute their data. These tools can help in developing and monitoring data management practices, improving security, promoting privacy and removing data duplicacy. Many companies with a large customer base manage a big amount of data for the effective marketing of their products. Using the right management tool can help them implement efficient business strategies.
4 Categories of data management software and tools
Here are the basic categories of data management software and tools depending on their functions and objectives:
Behavioural management tools
Tools that focus on behavioural data and allow businesses to understand consumer interactions are behavioural management tools. These tools can help you analyse how a customer engages with a product. You can understand the conversion rate, engagement and customer retention of a business. Behavioural data may include different types of information such as email signups or page views which you can collect through company websites, mobile applications and billing systems. With the help of the right behavioural management tools, you can collect the right data that may be helpful in decision-making processes.
Business intelligence management tools
Business intelligence involves collecting and analysing data to help businesses make the right business decisions. Business intelligence tools allow data management professionals to collect valuable data to enhance production efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and increase overall revenue. These tools can help businesses implement effective strategies to grow in the competitive market. You can use these tools to transform data sets into valuable business insights. By using business intelligence tools, data management professionals can contribute to the decision-making and strategic planning of an organisation.
Customer data management tools
Customer management tools can help organisations collect and track the information of their customers and analyse it to improve their marketing efforts. Data management professionals can collect real-time and personalised customer data from various sources. They gather relevant data sets and connect different links to form a unified profile of individual customers. The customer management tools can allow you to analyse the collected data and implement effective marketing campaigns. With the help of these tools, you can gain insights into the preferences and demographics of customers.
Data warehouse management tools
A data warehouse is a storage of data from one or multiple sources that a business may use to make informed decisions. Data warehouse management tools can provide the primary repository of information for an organisation. By storing important data in one place, data management professionals can remove invalid or outdated information from the data sets. These tools can also help in creating reports, planning strategies and meeting changing business requirements.
7 tools for data management
Here are different types of tools that can help businesses streamline their data management process:
1. Talend
Talend is a data management platform that helps organisations improve their data agility, culture and trust. This tool provides a wide range of data integration and management solutions. Health care, government, retail, financial and telecommunication organisations can use Talend to achieve good data health. The data mapping tool from Talend can help in mapping complex document formats such as JSON or XML files. Many companies use Talend products to manage data integration, data integrity and application integration.
2. Teradata
Teradata is another tool that helps in cloud data warehousing, digital identity management and risk mitigation. It allows companies to solve complex data challenges, create forecasts and plans for supply chains and maximise operational efficiency. Businesses in various industries such as transport, health care, manufacturing, retail and automotive can use this tool to manage their data sets.
3. SAP data management
SAP is a versatile tool with different solutions such as data management, business intelligence, financial management and supply chain management. It allows organisations to collect and analyse business data. They can improve analytics processes and business outcomes. Data management solutions that SAP offers include data warehousing, data lifecycle management, data intelligence and data mapping.
4. Marklogic
Marklogic is a data integration and management solution which assists companies to store and manage their databases securely. It helps in running various operational, analytical and transactional applications associated with the data. Marklogic may also offer a NoSQL multi-model system to store and manage a variety of data. By using this tool, companies can solve complex data challenges and achieve data agility.
5. IBM data management
IBM data management offers virtual data management tools to help companies automate their data usage and improve data agility and efficiency. Many businesses use this tool to manage their critical data and gain a clear understanding of all the aspects of data management. It also provides helpful insights to execute informed marketing actions. IBM data management provides solutions for optimising query performance, cloning the database, backup or restoring and migrating the data.
6. Cloudera
Many financial, insurance and manufacturing companies use Cloudera to deploy modern data architectures. This data management platform can provide different products such as data warehouse, machine learning, data engineering and data hub. Data management professionals often use Cloudera for its high-level security, optimal performance, faster tools and data analytics features. Companies can use this data management service to get analytics across multi and hybrid clouds.
7. Informatica MDM
This cloud-based platform provides multiple solutions to improve master data management. Companies can use this Informatica MDM to get 360-degree insights into business data and improve productivity through automation. Examples of solutions this tool offers are analytics, AI and data warehouse, cloud modernisation, data governance and data integration. With Informatica MDM, you can organise data sets and track data movement for impact analysis.
8. SAS data management
Many data management professionals use SAS to make data-driven decisions for companies. This tool can allow you to access the data from the cloud, data lakes or legacy systems. Companies can use SAS data management for metadata management, data access, data governance and master data management.
9. Profisee
Profisee is a master data management solution that helps businesses enhance data quality and improve their revenue growth and customer experience. Many manufacturing and health care organisations use Profisee to remove inaccurate and duplicate data for better operational efficiency. Data management professionals can revise strategic initiatives with Profisee and ensure high-level results. This tool can provide multiple features including data governance, data fabric, machine learning, cost reduction and data quality.
10. TIBCO MDM
Another tool for data management is TIBCO MDM which assists businesses to ensure the accuracy and consistency of master and reference data. Many organisations use this tool to gain accurate business insights and KPIs to make data-driven decisions. With TIBCO MDM, companies can create policies and monitor their impact on business operations. Other benefits of using this data management software are improvement in revenue growth, productivity and optimisation of the supply chain.
