Data administration

Data administration is, in Computing Science, the administration of the organisation of data, usually as stored in Databases under some Database Management System or alternative systems such as electronic spreadsheets.

In many smaller organisations, Data Administration is not performed at all, or is but a small parcel of the Database Administrator’s work.

Data Administration ideally begins at software conception, ensuring there is a data dictionary to help keeping consistency and avoid redundancy and modelling the database so as to make it logical and usable, by means of the normalisation technique.

Quite often such modelling is mistaken as diagramming, because of the prevalence of entity-relationship diagrams.

Data Resource Management refers to the development and maintenance of data models to facilitate data sharing between different systems, particularly in a corporate context. DRM is concerned with both data quality and compatibility between data models.

Data Resource management is a managerial activity that applies information system and other data management tool to the task of managing an organization’s data resource to meet an company’s business need and the information they provide to their shareholders.

Since the beginning of the information age, businesses need all types of data on their business activity. With each data created, when a business transaction is made, need data is created. With these data, new direction is needed that focuses on managing data as a critical resource of the organization to directly support its business activities. The data resource must be managed with the same intensity and formality that other critical resources are managed. Organizations must emphasize the information aspect of information technology, determine the data needed to support the business, and then use appropriate technology to build and maintain a high-quality data resource that provides that support.

Data resource quality is a measure of how well the organization's data resource supports the current and the future business information demand of the organization. The data resource cannot support just the current business information demand while sacrificing the future business information demand. It must support both the current and the future business information demand. The ultimate data resource quality is stability across changing business needs and changing technology.

A corporate data resource must be developed within single, organization-wide common data architecture. A data architecture is the science and method of designing and constructing a data resource that is business driven, based on real-world objects and events as perceived by the organization, and implemented into appropriate operating environments. It is the overall structure of a data resource that provides a consistent foundation across organizational boundaries to provide easily identifiable, readily available, high-quality data to support the business information demand.

The common data architecture is a formal, comprehensive data architecture that provides a common context within which all data at an organization's disposal are understood and integrated. It is subject oriented, meaning that it is built from data subjects that represent business objects and business events in the real world that are of interest to the organization and about which data are captured and maintained.