Information Management 1

Learning Plan
Lesson No: 2

Lesson Title: Organizing Data

Let’s Hit These:

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Describe the importance of organizing data in an organization.

 Distinguish between the five methods for data organization.

Let’s Get Started:

Organize the given data to reveal its meaning. Write your answer on a piece of paper.

Philippines P#4 Calbayog City Brgy. Dagum Western Samar

Let’s Find Out:

The above activity lets you organize the data to come up with a useful piece of
information. Organizing these data, we would have: P#4 Brgy. Dagum, Calbayog City,
Western Samar, Philippines.

Before we have arranged these data, each of them bears only its own sense and is not
meaningful. But, after organizing them, we now have a piece information that has a complete
thought and which corresponds to an address.

Let’s Read:

Organizing data is very difficult. There are many ways that you can do it. Actually,
there is an infinite number of options that you can take to organize the data properly. There are
people who have issues with data organization simply because of the huge volumes that it
presents itself in. Big data is an asset for your business, but then it also poses an innumerable
lot of challenges that you really do not want to experience. Here is the amazing thing that you
probably do not know- there are only five ways to organize data.

There is a world of difference between designing the database and the data organization
itself. How will the data be organized in the database? This is the question that you need to
answer. The answer is bound to be one of the five methods discussed here. To put the issue
into perspective better, consider this scenario. You are your company’s content curator and
your boss has asked you to organize all the content related to sales and marketing. How are you
going to do the data organization? Some people will go for alphabetical structure while others
will go for date of the content creation and such things.

Data is the basis of the facts, expertise and ultimately the wisdom of a company for
right decisions and actions. If the data is valid, full, reliable, meaningful, and actionable, it will
support the organization's growth. In order to enhance the quality of the data and information,
data management or company efforts should be taken.
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A lot of consideration has to be made in the data planning. This will make it possible
for effective communication as well as access to the information from the database. Luckily,
as aforementioned, there are only five options that you have to worry about. These data
organization options include:

1. Location. Data can be organized by showing a visual depiction of some physical space.
The keyword here is visual. Regardless of your goal for the data organization project, if
you choose to organize by location, you will have to give some sort of visualization of a
place or area. Maps are the most common ways to organize information based on location.
Consider maps like those of some college campus or the shopping mall directories. They
give you a mental image of where a particular shop or lecture hall is located in relation to
another. Organizing data based on location helps to show the relationships between the
various types of content that are relevant to each other.

2. Alphabetical organization. This is probably the first option that many people consider.
Organizing data alphabetically sounds easy and very fast. It actually is easy to organize the
data alphabetically. However, remember that data organization is not just for the purpose
of storage of the information, but its retrieval is important as well.

Organizing information by alphabetical order works excellently only if people know

some specific terms or topics that they are looking for. In such a case, accessing some
particular content will be more like taking a walk in the park. Since you know that the topic
you are searching for begins with letter ‘T’, you will not have to waste time going through
the contents beginning with the other letters. It is just like the index that is located in the
back of a textbook or using a dictionary.

This method of data organization will be more or less useless if the individual does not
know the topic that they are looking for. If the terms that you use do not make sense to a
viewer then alphabetical order will not be of much help to them. This method is fantastic
for fictional novels and such content where the data can be organized by things like the
author’s last name. However it will not work for non- fiction reference books.

3. Time. Time is everything all over the universe. It might not be everything in data
organization, but then it is one of the options that you have to organize your content. If you
want to find information in a chronological order, then organizing the information based
on the time it was created is the best method to use. This method is fantastic because it can
show you how things happen over a fixed period of time.

Most institutions choose to organize data by time because this method tells a very
different story about the information compared to other methods. Take for instance data on
financial activity of a business. The best way to organize this is by time. You could organize
the data by location to show where the money is coming from or going to, but then if you
organize the data by time then, you will get a comprehensive look of your data.

4. Hierarchy. Hierarchies are beneficial when you want to show how one piece of
information is related to another one in the order of importance or their ranks. They are
used in organizational charts when you want to show who should report to whom.
Essentially, they are excellent when organizing data in a human resource department. They
can also be used to show scale, for instance things like biggest to smallest or lightest to
 Information Management 1

heaviest. You can organize the data in ascending or descending order although many people
choose to work with descending order.

5. Category. This is another option that you can take. Organizing content by category can be
very tiring to start with but it is still an option. Categories are very useful for a variety of
purposes, for example describing different types of data that are being generated by an
institution. The problem with this method is that it is so broad compared to the other
methods. You can organize the data in just about any way imaginable – by color, gender,
price, shape, model etc. The options are infinite.

Let’s Remember:

There are only five ways to organize data. Of course there are other avenues that you
could possibly employ to do the data organization, but then they will always fall somewhere in
one of these methods. The option that you take is dependent on your business’ specific needs.
Always keep in mind that while you are doing the data organization for your organization, that
data retrieval is also important. The data should not only be easy to store but also easy to access.