Data hygiene is the practice of maintaining information that is relevant, well-organized, useful, and secure. Casual data use can result in data stored in many different places across a half-dozen programs. This can result in the accumulation of old and outdated information and unconnected data storage, making it impossible to maintain a comprehensive record.
For a Tribal Government, data hygiene practices can define the difference between swiftly serving your community and combating a constant digital paperwork shuffle.
Review all the data stored by your Tribal Government. Look into program and platform storage, databases, and documents stored on local computers in addition to the official central data storage locations. Know all the data you possess and what it means. If you're storing the data, you should know about it and have it available for future reference.
Regularly review your data to determine what is useful, current, accurate, and relevant. Data accumulates naturally, and it's up to you to determine whether it’s worth maintaining and keeping.
Store all your data in standardized data structures. For ease in compiling your documents, consider scanning with Laserfiche ECM, a document management software. You can also create standardized rules that help organize data and store it in a central location. Place limits on unstructured data that can't be easily organized and stored. A data structure example might be tribal member records in which each fact about a person is part of the structure including their name, address, and other details.
Delete data that isn’t useful or is no longer accurate and can't be updated. Old data, trash data, and temporary data should be cleared out regularly. These clutter the more useful data in the natural course of running your Tribal Government.
Store all your data in a single location. This becomes your "source of truth" that is kept current and accurate. All software and reference procedures should access this centralized data, and updates should be made to data at the core location. Prioritize software that integrates and can share a single database or set of records files. A single source of truth is easier to maintain and ensures that no one uses bad data by relying on outdated local files.
Always be updating. Your people will move, your policies may change, and your individual records will need to be updated. Make sure your data keeps up both through manual and automated updates.
Keeping up with technology introduces the challenge and opportunity to audit your data hygiene. Digital transformation or cloud migration gives you a chance to review, structure, and centralize your data as you go through these natural upgrades to your Tribal Government management systems.
Data hygiene is essential for any Tribal Government going through document digitization, switching to a new platform, or migrating to the cloud. These tools are only helpful if you can access all your data in one place. Your data should be easy to access with comprehensive cross-references and the ability to keep information about your community up-to-date. Everyone connected by computers and digital platforms can be on the same page, with the most useful data at all times, but only if data hygiene is built into the way you handle digital documents and information.
Data hygiene starts with a secure online application for easy document management. OneTribe is designed to support the complexity of data sharing among Tribal Member services. Contact us to learn about OneTribe and how it can help you follow these data hygiene best practices.