Unlocking Value from Data: How to Revolutionize Your Data Strategy with DRM Software

Nomad Data
May 30, 2023
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According to a Q4 2022 Gartner survey, only 44% of data and analytics leaders worldwide believe their teams are effectively delivering value to their organizations.

The prevailing sentiment among data and analytics leaders is that an undue amount of time is being expended on data management and quality assurance tasks, diverting focus from activities that genuinely drive business growth and innovation. Yet, data leaders continue to grapple with challenges that prevent them from maximizing the value of their data assets.

This article explores how Data Relationship Management (DRM) software can help overcome these hurdles and revolutionize your data strategy.

What is a Data Relationship Manager (DRM)?

Data Relationship Manager (DRM) is a unifying platform that centralizes all data assets, communications, internal annotations, vendor use cases, and previous insights derived from data.

DRM tracks all interactions around data, akin to a CRM. The true value of DRM lies in its ability to streamline the process of managing complex data ecosystems, enabling businesses to make more informed and strategic decisions because all users can derive value from all data assets.

Note: Nomad Data’s DRM empowers your knowledge workers to make smarter decisions and drive revenue growth – Create your own DRM for free today

The role of DRM in modern business

The surge in datasets in recent years has transformed the data landscape into something reminiscent of the Wild West.

In this era of big data growth, DRM has become essential. It helps business users understand all data ever interacted with at their firm, and how they were used. This complete transparency ensures knowledge workers can make better decisions without guesswork.

DRM’s ability to manage vendor relationships, and provide context for their uses case allows organizations to mitigate duplicate spend and allocate budgets to new data opportunities.

Without a doubt, data and analytics leaders need to prioritize actions that lead to major change. While managing and governing data is crucial, using technology to automate these areas can create the foundation for more actions that move the needle.

Navigating data leadership challenges

Chief Data Officers, data managers, strategists, analysts, scientists, and engineers have grappled with a set of persistent challenges in recent years. These obstacles are poised to intensify with the continual influx of datasets and the escalating expectations for leaders to leverage data for digital transformation.

Let’s take a look at some of these challenges.

Proving worth and budget justification

Data leaders often find themselves wrestling with the substantial challenge of demonstrating their value and justifying budget allocations for data operations. Due to the pivotal role data plays in business decisions, the data leader's influence is far-reaching, affecting both present outcomes and future directions. If a CDO or Data Lead falters in proving their value, it negatively impacts the entire organization, while success brings wide-ranging benefits. Thus, showcasing one's contribution isn't merely a responsibility, it's a significant opportunity for individual and organizational success.

Shifting perception: From cost center to revenue driver

The perception of data functions as a cost center rather than a revenue generator poses another significant challenge for data leaders. The key to overcoming this barrier lies in showcasing the potential of effective data strategies to drive revenue, enhance decision making, and carve a competitive advantage. This issue is further compounded by a lack of structured software-driven processes around data relationship management, leading to wasteful double or triple spending on data, redundancy in efforts, and substantial setbacks from employee turnover.

Connecting knowledge workers to the right datasets

The potential of data lies in its relevance and accessibility. A persistent pain point for many organizations is connecting knowledge workers with the appropriate datasets, leading to underutilization of valuable insights. DRM tracks all the interactions around data and thus provides the context for immediate understanding across different teams and departments.

Note: Check out our next article in this series on Nomad Data’s Enterprise Data Discovery product, which allows end users to describe their use case and be quickly connected to the internal or external datasets that can address it.

Increasing ROI of technical investments

Extracting maximum value from technical investments remains a daunting task for many organizations. This is due in part to a lack of integration and visibility, often a result of a casual approach to managing data and vendor relationships. Many data organizations also incur significant upfront costs to facilitate data accessibility, a burden that's challenging to offset due to this absence of visibility.

The implementation of a dataset in analysis or a product usually comes with substantial learnings that unfortunately get lost due to poor documentation and sharing practices. These include best practices for cleaning data, addressing challenges faced in the past, colleagues who are up-to-date and can offer advice, and the most successful use cases for a dataset.

So, how does DRM target the distinct challenges of senior data leaders and their teams?

The CDO

Chief Data Officers (CDOs), despite having the shortest average tenure among top executive roles, are tasked with sparking significant change within their first two years. The challenge lies in effectively communicating their value and achievements internally, due in part to the nuances in language between data and business.

Moreover, the task of establishing an ideal data environment within companies is daunting, given the prevalence of outdated systems and the assumption of high costs associated with large-scale change. This often hampers their ability to implement better solutions and generate significant impact. The environment that this role inhabits is rarely designed to facilitate change, despite that being the very expectation from business leaders.

Empowering data resource

Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Data Team

As a Chief Data Officer, the efficiency of your data team is likely one of your top priorities. Aligning a diverse group of data managers, strategists, analysts, scientists, and engineers is no easy task, yet it is crucial for sound business decision-making.

However, when your top-tier talent is mired in administrative tasks or stuck acting as intermediaries, their problem-solving capacities are underutilized. You might find it challenging to advocate for expanding your team when the existing team members are not being used to their full potential.

Driving Cohesion and Efficiency with DRM

Data Relationship Management (DRM) can be your tool to bring about a transformation. By providing a unified, 360-degree view of data, DRM streamlines the way your team interacts with and manages data. This cohesive approach not only fosters improved collaboration but also enables your team to assist end users in locating the right data for their use case at a faster pace.

DRM lists all your data vendors,  datasets, and contacts  in one place so it’s easy for your team to understand the context behind the data.

Optimizing Time and Resources

The time-saving aspect of DRM cannot be overstated. Consider the countless hours spent on managing data requests, searching through documents for specific data, or matching data to certain use cases. These tasks, although essential, can often distract your skilled data professionals from their core functions.

Implementing DRM can significantly reduce this administrative burden, freeing up your team to focus on deriving insights, enhancing data quality, and ultimately driving strategic business decisions. This efficiency gain can bolster the justification for investing in more resources for your data team. With a well-structured, efficient team and the support of DRM, your data strategy will be poised for success.

Data management and strategy teams

Data management and strategy teams play a pivotal role within organizations – aiding the Chief Data Officer (CDO) in defining data strategies, overseeing governance and enhancing data operations. Despite their importance, these teams often face a myriad of challenges that hamper their efficiency and impact.

One of the major challenges facing data management and strategy leaders is inefficient processes. Data management teams are often caught in a time-consuming tug of war between business users and data owners, both internal and external. This manual back-and-forth can limit their capacity to address user needs and detract from their primary task of enhancing data value.

Data management teams also grapple with managing irrelevant data. An efficient data management team should focus on gathering precise datasets that align directly with the needs and goals of business leaders. Unfortunately, the collection of redundant data without any prior evaluation records is a frequent problem due to siloed data purchases.

Strategy team's mission is not only to streamline data usage but also to amplify its impact, thereby driving a superior ROI from the organization's data expenditure, ultimately enhancing business performance. DRM provides strategy teams with the fundamental instrument for cataloging all their data, while EDD supports the execution of their strategy and facilitates interaction with the broader organization.

Data management and strategy experts need to be indispensable allies to business leaders, ensuring they have timely access to data that meets their needs. However, the amalgamation of the challenges above impedes their capacity to fulfil this role effectively.

How DRM solves these challenges

By centralizing all data interactions, a DRM system reduces repetitive evaluations of the same vendor or dataset across different groups. This increased transparency also helps identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, optimizing the organization's data ROI.

DRM also consolidates the entire end-to-end data process, including relationships with data vendors, in a single, centralized location. It’s easy to log any kind of activity with any dataset: a meeting, an email, evaluation or internal note.


This central hub streamlines communication between data management teams, business leaders, internal data owners, and external data vendors, reducing the time-consuming manual coordination that often bogs down these teams.

The benefits of implementing a DRM system are substantial. Not only can data management teams respond more quickly to data requests, but they can also spend less time on manual tasks and more on driving efficiency gains across the organization. In doing so, they can shift from being perceived as a cost center to a key player in enhancing top-line KPIs.

By equipping data management teams with the tools they need to simplify their processes and demonstrate their value, DRM can transform how these teams operate and how they contribute to their organization's success.

Data scientists, analysts and engineers

Data scientists, analysts, and engineers are the heart of any data-driven operation. With their robust analytics capabilities, business acumen, and knack for mining, cleaning, and presenting data, these professionals transform raw data into actionable insights. But they face significant challenges, including finding the right datasets for experimentation, dealing with poor-quality data, and the time drain of navigating static data catalogs.

DRM streamlines communication among team members and ensures the knowledge accumulated from previous evaluations is preserved and tied to the dataset in question. The risk of wasting time on poor-quality datasets is mitigated, maximizing productivity and satisfaction.

It allows any data scientist to see which employee purchased a dataset, how the data was used previously and the insights that were generated. They have immediate context as to whether other scientists, analysts and engineers found the data to be high quality. This beats sifting through a static data catalog with limited information.

The benefits of DRM for data scientists, analysts, and engineers are significant. With the reduction in time spent on data searching and cleansing, these professionals can focus more on tasks that add value, such as in-depth data analysis and connecting data insight to business revenue.

Conclusion: Constructing a Data-Driven Future with DRM

In conclusion, DRM presents a compelling solution for modern CDOs and data leaders wrestling with complex data ecosystems. DRM is a comprehensive record-keeper for every vendor, dataset, and contact. It meticulously tracks each interaction, whether it's a conversation, evaluation, purchase, or internal note, ensuring the retention of crucial institutional knowledge over time.

DRM manages all data subscriptions from one consolidated platform, safeguarding the historical context of data evaluations across teams to eliminate overspend, while delivering timely alerts for upcoming renewals and opt-out dates.

By centralizing all data relationships within one system, DRM bridges the gap between data and business insights, equipping data leaders with the tools to orchestrate powerful data-driven strategies.

Create your free DRM today.

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