Data is one of the most valuable assets of any organization.
Still, the effective management of data assets can also be one of the most challenging aspects of your strategy.
Successful Data Governance ensures that your data is high quality, secure and accessible for your business needs.
Businesses are constantly gathering more and more amounts of data from different sources.
As a result, complying with internal policies and external regulations is more critical than ever.
Comprehensive Data Governance programs are core components and critical aspects that can help you improve your Business Strategy.
They enable better information-related processes and accurate analytics, which enhance user satisfaction and customer service, reduce costs and comply with industry regulations.
But how do you implement Data Governance in your organization? How can you measure its impact on your business performance?
In this post, we will answer these questions and help you take control of your data.
What is Data Governance?
Data Governance focuses on management practices to ensure data quality, security and usability throughout its lifecycle.
Governance efforts involve defining the governance roles, business rules, policies, standards and procedures.
These apply in collecting, storing, accessing, sharing and using data in your organization.
Likewise, Data Governance activities provide lineage visualization, which lets you illustrate data flows.
Lineage tracking activities also help ensure that your data is accurate, consistent, reliable.
It's also key to comply with the rules and regulations that apply to your business operations and domain.
Data Governance also helps you leverage data as a strategic asset supporting your business objectives.
To summarize, Data Governance is how you control your data and make it work for you.
The Elements of Data Governance
You need to establish a comprehensive Data Governance framework for managing and using data in your organization.
The framework consists of four main essential elements: data strategy, data architecture, data policiesand data roles.
Let's take a look at each of them in more detail:
1. Data Governance Strategy
Data strategy defines the vision, goals, and objectives for your data.
It helps you align your Data Governance roadmap with your business strategy and create value from your data.
For example, you might use Data Governance to boost satisfaction, cut costs or create new products or services.
2. Data Governance Architecture
Data architecture defines the structure, design, and integration of your data.
It helps you ensure the quality and consistency of your data and optimize your data processes and workflows.
You can use data architecture for storage, quick access and source integration.
3. Data Governance Policies
Data policies define quality rules, standards and procedures for collecting, processing, distributing, and consuming data.
It helps you protect and respect your data and comply with the regulations and ethics that apply to your data.
You may want to leverage policies to secure data from unauthorized access and monitor its activity and performance.
There's also the need to comply with laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
4. Data Governance Roles
Data roles define the responsibilities, accountabilities, compliance requirements and decision rights of the people involved.
This collaborative process helps you communicate with users and stakeholders to ensure everyone follows the defined framework.
You acn want to hire subject matter experts to work on different functions and tasks in your data governance teams.
Some roles include Chief Data Officer, Data Scientists, Data Analysts and Data Engineers.
How To Measure Data Governance?
It's important to track Data Governance on your organization and evaluate its effectiveness and efficiency.
But how can you measure the impact of Data Governance? Here are some steps that you can follow:
- Definition: Before starting, you must define what you want to achieve and how to measure it. Align your Data Governance and your business goals while identifying specific Key Performance Indicators.
- Collection: Gather and analyze data to see how well it performs. Use reliable and consistent sources and methods to process your data! You should also choose your Data Governance tools and techniques to visualize data. Common tools include Colibra and Microsoft Purview. Likewise, techniques enclose surveys, audits, reports and dashboards.
- Benchmarking: After collecting, compare and benchmark your data to get a more deep analysis. Match your current data with previous or target data to know if you have improved or achieved your goals. Also, benchmark data with peers and competitors to see where you stand in the market.
- Reporting:Share your findings with stakeholders and teams! Use concise language and clear formats to present your data actionable yet meaningfully. With these data-driven insights, you can foster a culture of collaboration to boost your performance.
Benefits of Data Governance
The Data Governance journey may sound tedious. Yet, it helps your business to avoid poor data quality and make bad business decisions.
Here are some of the benefits of data governance that you should know.
- Decision-Making: A Data Governance plan can help you master effective data management accurately, consistently and reliably. In other words, you can trust it to level up your data-related decisions and see the business benefits. This approach enables easier access, control and analysis of data. As a result, teams can gain valuable insights and make data-driven decisions faster.
- Reduced Costs: A Data Governance strategy prevents data error sand breaches, saving time and money on repair and maintenance. It also enables optimizing data processes and workflows. With it, teams can improve operational efficiency and productivity.
- Regulation Compliance: It's key to comply with the regulations that apply to your industry or domain. The most known is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Yet, there's also the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
- Competitive Advantage:Data Governance allows to leverage data as a strategic data. By building value from your data, you can better support your business goals and the efforts these take. Likewise, it helps you differentiate yourself from competitors and gain a competitive advantage.
When To Start With Data Governance?
You cannot postpone or ignore the Data Governance ongoing process!
The sooner you start an effective DG program within your business, the better.
Doing so can avoid confusion and chaos and ensure data clarity and confidence.
Furthermore, it helps prevent data errors and breaches, guaranteeing secure and high-quality data.
This benefit is especially important for some lines of business, like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
By implementing Data Governance policies at a strategic level, you can reduce data costs and risks.
At the same time, you can increase data value and collaboration among teams.
With the help of your data, you'll be able to achieve your business goals more efficiently and effectively!
Conclusion
Data Governance is a core feature for business processes to use data effectively and efficiently.
It can help you improve your business performance, user satisfaction, cost reduction, business outcomes, regulatory compliance, and regulatory requirements.
Remember that the Data Governance strategy won't work without business ownership!
It involves defining your data strategy, architecture, bi-directional integration policies and analytics systems.
It also requires measuring their impact through control measurements.
Data Governance is a smart way to leverage key insights of your context to boost user trust.
Are you ready to take control of critical data elements and level up the enforcement of governance policies? Get in touch with Capicua!
