Data Love Languages: 5 Ways to Show Your Data You Care

While hearts and roses steal the spotlight, Valentine’s Day isn’t just about romance—it’s about celebrating all the relationships that matter to you. And that includes the relationship you have with your data!

Just like the important people in your life, your data needs love and attention, too. So in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be fun to use Dr. Gary Chapman’s premise of the five love languages to explore how you can give your data the love and attention it deserves.

5 Data Love Languages

Popularized in his book “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts,”  Dr. Chapman describes the five love languages as the various ways people express and receive love. He believes that understanding someone’s love language enables you to express your emotions in a way that resonates with them, ultimately strengthening relationships and deepening connections with those you love. 

Although they are not people, you can still have a relationship with your data, which, like people, requires constant care and attention. And how we approach the nurturing of our data can vary, depending on its state and maturity as well as what “language” suits the data best. Let’s take a look.
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1. Words of Affirmation: Data Quality

When a person’s love language is words of affirmation, they value encouragement, praise, and compliments. These kind words not only provide a person with validation, but they also boost their confidence. And just like people, your data needs validation, too. 

Assessing your data’s integrity is an important step in the MDM journey. Doing so enables you to identify what data is high-quality and what data needs a little bit more love. Once you understand your data’s current state, you can then take steps to improve its quality. Similar to how praise and compliments lift people up, taking steps to eliminate duplicates, correct inaccuracies, and fill-in missing values lifts up your data, too. And when your data is better, more people trust it and feel confident using it to drive real business value. 
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2. Acts of Service: Data Governance

When it comes to acts of service, actions definitely speak louder than words. And taking the action to strengthen data governance is one that will pay dividends. Implementing data governance establishes clear policies and procedures for how your organization accesses, uses, and secures its data, while also establishing necessary protections that safeguard your organization from unforeseen risks. 

Governing your data not only demonstrates your commitment to protecting it, but also underscores your data’s value within the organization, which only strengthens your relationship with it. By taking this simple action, you signal to the business – and your data – that it matters. 
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3. Receiving Gifts: Data Enrichment

When a person’s love language is receiving gifts, they appreciate the thoughtful time and attention someone takes to enhance their lives with something meaningful. In data terms, this is data enrichment. 
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing, internal datasets with information from additional internal and external data sources. These sources could include data about organizations, people, or products, or data that could be used for sales and marketing, product analytics, risk management, and more. Like a thoughtful gift that brightens someone’s day, these additional data sets improve and enhance your existing data by making it more accurate and complete, which, in turn, cultivates trust.
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4. Quality Time: Data-Driven Culture

Just like in personal relationships, data thrives when you give it your undivided attention. And what better way to show your data some love than to establish a culture where everyone regularly and consistently uses data to drive business decisions. 

Building a data-driven culture goes beyond simply making data easily accessible. It also requires you to invest quality time improving data literacy and empowering everyone to use the data to make informed decisions. When you establish a data-driven culture, it requires everyone – from the CEO to the analysts within each department – to adopt a data-first mindset. It also calls for data democratization to ensure everyone has access to it. Finally, businesses must spend time implementing the right technologies along with the DataOps processes needed to maintain the data’s integrity, availability, and security. 
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5. Physical Touch: Data Integration

Just like humans crave connection with others, data needs connections so it can flow across systems within your organization. This data integration is critical as it enables you to break down data silos and resolve entities so you can finally deliver the complete, trustworthy golden records your business needs to drive the business forward. 

Using solutions like AI-native MDM help to integrate your data so you can deliver the golden records everyone needs and expects. Because AI-native MDM is built from the ground up with AI at its core, it utilizes rich AI/ML mastering, data enrichment, and real-time capabilities to connect data across systems and sources so you always have access to the best, most up-to-date information for use in analytics and business operations.

Like any long, fulfilling relationship, staying connected to your data requires ongoing attention, commitment, and a whole lot of love. By speaking your data’s love language, you take the right steps towards fostering an enduring, long-lasting relationship that grows even more valuable over time. This Valentine’s Day, isn’t it time to show your data the love it deserves?