The discourse on how much data is required to run a business has become a trend. Which is better: less or more? Or is there a way to achieve the best of both worlds? Our interactions with technology—using data as our currency—have resulted in further technological developments that have in turn improved our livelihood.
It's clear that productive data usage can have a significant impact on the future of your business, and it also impacts future realities. But as a business, how do you ensure you make productive data transactions and furthermore, how do you ensure proper data management and distribution within your organization? 
Operational and analytical data
Operational and analytical data are two distinct components of your business. Operational data is the collection of your day-to-day data, like sales interactions, customer requests, inventory records, and so on. Analytical data, on the other hand, is derived from the operational data. It provides insights, forecasts, and patterns related to business development. It is used to identify opportunities and make strategic decisions.
Data diversity and a united repository
Operational data comes in so many diverse forms, in order to guarantee accurate analytical data, you need to employ data management practices. Initially, data management was adopted to ensure the proper creation and acquisition of data, but over time, data disposal became part of the life cycle. Data management ensures that the diverse datasets from across departments are managed properly. This entails - structuring, processing, and employing defined schemas in the data warehouse.
Having a unified data repository provides you with a single view of the data from across all the departments that run your business and improves data accessibility. Having a data management tool also helps you derive value from the vast amounts of data that otherwise remain unused. It connects disparate warehouses, thereby improving your company's productivity.
How to avoid the business data museum matrix
Business data museums are also becoming more and more common due to neglected mistake purchases in the earlier days of technology adoption. Some businesses find themselves in a difficult position due to outdated data stored in monolithic legacy systems. They are also met with challenges when they want to scale their business or migrate to a better-suited solution.
Adopting a data management tool and hiring a steward to regulate business data can help businesses derive quality analyses and ensure they're making up-to-date data transactions.
With current industry offerings, you can only go as far as gathering all the data from different departments and then loading them into a repository of your choice with the help of multiple connectors. Even with meticulous oversight, this has often proven to create breakage when there is a sudden update in one of your other solutions. Data management done this way is very inefficient.
So, what is data management done right?
On productive data management
The operating system for business – Zoho One is a highly effective solution that enables productive data management. You can use it to manage both your operational and analytical data and to make data-driven business decisions without having to adopt additional modules and integrations. It offers you a unified view of all your data so you can manage all your data in a single repository. This makes data accessible across departments to ensure consistent and personalized customer journeys, enables you to track real-time data, and helps you set up cross-app automation.
Apart from data management, the operating system for business also provides 45+ business apps created from extensive R&D to productively decrease the number of solutions you need to adopt and improve your growth rate. It suits all business ecosystems and has proven to be very scalable. It also helps you further enhance the quality of your data with tools like DataPrep.
On productive data usage
With DataPrep, you can:
Import data from your cloud warehouse.
Filter and cleanse your data.
Format and transform your data.
Deploy AI-based data enrichment.
Continuously ensure high data quality.
Set access-based permissions.
Access Zoho Analytics.
Once your data is prepared, you can use it to get:
Predictive analysis – Helps you foresee your company's near future in terms of your potential market position or a financial uptick. It predicts variables that might indicate trends. It can also be applied to strategies when you notice a pattern. This type of analysis is primarily based on pre-existing data sourced over a certain period of time.
Prescriptive analysis – Provides suggestions that can further improve your strategy and makes recommendations based on statistics from previous ventures. It also helps you analyze potential outcomes based on customers' past responses.
Analytical data has become standard for creating optimized strategies and error-free, confident decisions.
We hope this blog makes data usage more approachable to you and while you're still here try Zoho One and see! 
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