Do You Need an Environmental Data Management Plan?
The ROI of Managing Your Data with a Plan
Based on a talk given by Siobhan Kitchen, ddms, Inc., at the Waste Management Symposium, 2025
Spoiler alert, yes, you do.
Before we get into why you need it, what is a data management plan? It’s a governing document that defines the rules for your environmental data management system.
What does that mean?
If you’re in mining or waste management, remediation, or energy — almost any industry — you can have large amounts of environmental data coming in and going out. You’re constantly making critical decisions, and you need to make sure that your data workflow is moving smoothly so you’re ready and able to make accurate sound decisions.
Two types of plans can help with that: a data governance plan and/or a data management plan. A data management plan is the “how” of data handling. It focuses on how you collect, store, and access the data. A data governance plan is more of the “what” and the “why.” What are the policies and standards? How is the data used? How is it managed? What are the quality and the security requirements?
You can have a separate data management plan and data governance plan, or you can combine them into a single document. For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to focus on data management plans.
Let’s start with the components:
- Data collection — What type of data is being collected? Is it soil, groundwater, surface water? How is it being collected?
- Documentation — What is the description of the data? How is it going to be organized?
- Storage and security — How are you going to share it and have it accessible to those that need it? How are you going to archive it and preserve it?
- Roles — Who’s responsible for what? Who’s going to manage that data?
The ROI of a Data Management Plan
If you’re not excited about creating a plan, let’s outline the benefits and see if that helps you see that the time it takes to create a plan is more than outweighed by the results. Data management plans enhance data quality by standardizing data formats and minimizing errors and inconsistencies. They eliminate the headaches and frustration (and the costs!) of going back to re-sample, re-process, and re-do all your reports. When you put clean data into your database, you get clean data out of it.
Four concrete benefits.
1. Compliance: Keep the Stakeholders Happy
A data management plan helps with the compliance of data requirements. In fact, some funding agencies require you to have data management plans to help you adhere to their regulatory requirements. If you’re constantly missing regulatory requirements or resubmitting documents and deliverables because you’re finding mistakes, you’re going to lose the support of your stakeholders.
2. Efficiency: You Don’t Have to Hunt for Data
It also helps with the efficiency of data management. It sets things up to help you save time by planning for data handling in advance, and it helps reduce duplication of efforts.
For example, suppose you need a rollback in EDD. Who do you need to call? It’s not documented anywhere, so you ask your manager. The manager says, oh, I think it was Bob. Bob helped us last time. But it turns out Bob is retired, so now you’re back at step 1.
How do you get the data when there’s no documentation on who’s doing what, and what is stored where? A plan helps you reduce that frustration of chasing down people and hunting through shared files to streamline the process.
3. Reproduction: Quality Data from Any Location
A plan supports data transparency and credibility by helping the whole company reproduce the same data in multiple areas, no matter which person is doing it. Think of it this way: suppose you have Jim, who’s working in the office in Denver, and then John, who’s working remotely in South Carolina. Can they produce the same data export? The same report? Maybe not.
4. Preservation: Don’t Lose What You Worked Hard to Collect
How many people have you met who stored all their data on Excel spreadsheets on their desktop, and then retired? That data’s gone.
With a plan in place on where data’s going to be stored, you can prevent data loss. Storage and security processes also help support historical and future needs. If your site is moved over to a long-term monitoring facility eventually, or perhaps under DOE Legacy Management, data that’s already clean and ready to go makes that transition much easier.
Bottom-line Benefits
Strong data management plans help reduce silos and increase efficiency— no more tracking down someone who might have something on their hard drive. Good plans also help you produce organized, high-quality data that makes it easier to collaborate across departments. It also makes it easier to keep your stakeholders informed and increases trust when they see quality data consistently produced.
You can learn more about our environmental data management services here.
And if you need help defining your needs for a strong data plan, whether it’s a data management plan or governance plan, please reach out. ddms brings a wealth of industry knowledge and experience to help you develop a plan tailor-made for your needs.