Data Management Issues

Data management is one of the most difficult aspects of the information infrastructure. All too often a very carefully designed system that has been designed to provide excellent benefits to power system operations is ignored, or actually turned off, because the input data is just not accurate or available enough for the results of the function to be trusted – ‘Garbage in; Garbage out’. Data management must address a complex set of issues, which include the following:

§ Validating source data and data exchanges

§ Ensuring data is up-to-date

§ Managing time-sensitive data flows and timely access to data by multiple different users

§ Managing data consistency and synchronization across systems

§ Managing data formats in data exchanges

§ Managing transaction integrity (backup and rollback capability)

§ Managing the naming of data items (namespace allocation and naming rules)

§ Maintaining database and data exchange

§ Logging, reports, and audit trails

No single technology exists that can be globally applied to handle all of these data management issues, but increasing attention is being paid to develop ‘best practices’ and to promote various technologies that solve part of the data management problems. These efforts and technologies then form the vision for data management.