EthanWhile most companies want to share their data across the organization, approaching step can be a challenge. Most of these challenges range from compliance issues to technical issues. This article will answer what is data governance and how to improve it across the entire business.
What is Data Governance?
Data governance is a series of practices that provide value to an enterprise. When coming up with a data governance framework initiative, you’ll want to come up with effective practices such as the ones found in the Data Management Association’s Body of Knowledge (DAMA-BOK). While each of these practices defines clear goals, it’s important to apply them throughout the enterprise since the first step can be costly and slow to provide value. Governance is based on six key principles:
1. Data set procedures only work when it’s implemented to make business decisions.
2. The value of the data is the sum of its benefits, minus the total of the costs to implement that data set.
3. The value chain for each data set has four parts: producer, publisher, consumer, and decision-maker.
4. Governance limits the data publisher to help data consumers.
5. Use governance when it provides value.
6. Governance imposes limits on the data publisher.
How to Improve Governance
If you’re taking a look at your organization’s governance plan, then the following steps will increase the benefits of your data governance framework that will increase profits.
Take Ownership of Data Management
Most companies are implementing the use of chief data officers (CDOs) that allows them to manage their business assets and data governance. Organizations that use a CDO were 70% more likely to improve compliance and reduce risk than organizations that don’t use a CDO. The first step is to shift your focus on data management responsibility. By changing your approach to data strategy, and hiring the right people who are responsible for governing and implementing it, then you’ll have better ownership of your data.
Plan a Connected Data Basis
The next step is to determine how you collect, consume, process, and store your data across your organization. Data management is a decentralized process that doesn’t have a strategy to implement or maintain it. It’s one of the reasons why it can be so hard to manage. Your data architecture should be standardized and your disparate systems should be connected to one another.
Once you achieve this goal, you can better align your data to your business strategy. Organizations that have lapsed with their systems often find gaps with they try to implement and maintain their data. They also experience non-compliance issues. Your existing data systems should be flexible for expanded growth.
Manage Your Metadata
Metadata is the information that’s found on your main data source that includes details on how it was acquired, created, and revised. It’ll also include information on how it was formatted and where it’s located. Creating and managing your metadata is important when it comes to accessing, consuming, and referencing your business information. Most organizations don’t have important information such as the name of the owner.
Managing your metadata allows you to determine and find information and measure its value so you can protect the data that’s important to you.
Determine How to Deliver Your Data
Once you manage your data, you should come up with a delivery format for use across your entire business. This is important if your company uses a combination of CRM and ERP technologies as well as e-commerce platforms. Data delivery involves putting the right information in the right hands. That’s why accurate reporting of your information is so important.
Your organization can provide the details it needs about the acquisition, management, and protection of the data you need. You also should have the right systems in place that will allow you to make smart business decisions on data-driven insights. For example, you can create customer data reports that create new products or improve existing ones that are focused on a particular customer need.
Set Consistent Policies
With the right data platform, you can focus on data governance practices by implementing consistent policies for managing and using that data. These policies should address the cloud as well as physical and virtual environments. You should classify all of your information and set controls for accessing, deleting, distributing, and retaining information.
While data management is an ongoing process for most organizations, approaching this stage involves enforcing company-wide policies surrounding data. It’s important for businesses this reach this stage as soon as possible. If you want to avoid penalties and optimize your business practices, then you need to create consistent policies.
