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As far back as the simple record keeping systems of the ancient Phoenicians, Sumerians and Egyptians, data management has been a discipline focused on capturing, storing and accessing information deemed to be significant. The earliest requirements for a data management system were standardized language or symbols, storage media (at the time, clay tablets and papyrus) and specially educated individuals who could prepare answers to questions posed to them (reports) by accessing the recorded information.

It's true that the emergence of the mainframe, programming languages and business productivity applications allowed organizations to capture and store more data than previously imaginable and to begin automating and accelerating basic business processes. Data management, though was still largely a matter of capture, store, access and report. Distributing data widely beyond the immediate scope of the application that created the data was not a priority. Well, those were simpler times. Today, the distribution of data is of utmost importance, because the data is needed by a broad audience and the response times have become much tighter by order of magnitude. The methods for distributing data in today's up-to-the-nanosecond business environment require a very different technology strategy than those of the past.

Beyond Record Keeping

Data management in today's organizations is quite different. While data capture, storage and report generation are still important and necessary tasks, data has evolved in type, usefulness and volume. Businesses must maintain operational data, but operational data does not drive business innovation and growth. Simple transactional records do not provide business insights and sales leads. The timely analysis of the operational data is the foundation for business growth. Thus, the timely delivery of business-critical operational data for analytic purposes is now the critical factor for success.

More than a decade into the Internet era, we work in increasingly unwired enterprises and in an increasingly mobile economy. When we talk about data management today, we're describing something much more detailed, sophisticated, vital and dynamic than simply managing a system of records.

An Invaluable Asset

We now know that data is much more valuable than past tense documentation. It is an invaluable asset - an asset that can be mined and analyzed in real time to identify new business opportunities, areas in which significant efficiencies can be achieved and ways in which products and processes can be continually improved to address - even anticipate - the needs and expectations of existing and prospective customers. In other words, data has value that goes well beyond being a mere system of records. Integrated from numerous sources from within and outside the organization and made easily available to many more users and applications, data has become the engine driving the growth of today's most successful organizations.

Data management is no longer a matter of tending to centralized application-specific databases. Nor is it a matter of mediating access to those databases. We have moved from the age of monolithic data management to distributed data management. There are a number of reasons for this evolution:

• Today's managers and knowledge workers recognize that data itself is a strategic asset that has the value and power to drive business growth and increase competitive advantage. They understand how to leverage the tremendous reach and immediacy of the Internet and the agility achieved by unwiring the enterprise. This new generation of business users demands more sophisticated, unmediated and free-form access to both structured and unstructured data using virtually any application.
• We are experiencing a data explosion. Organizations in multiple industries routinely process and manage terabytes - even petabytes - of data. Traditional, centralized distribution methods, designed to handle relatively small data volumes, no longer suffice in today's data-on-demand businesses. Bottlenecks, due to technology or the intervention of mediators, that slow the delivery of data to users cannot be tolerated.
• Millions more external users, doing business with organizations via the Internet and various mobile channels, expect the data they want to be available anytime, anywhere.
• Both internal and external users expect the data they need to be automatically delivered to them on the device of their choice and refreshed on a schedule they determine.

New Challenges

IT professionals face a host of new challenges our predecessors could not have envisioned. We must manage enormous volumes of data in a way that: