Businesses require more than just data if they want to be successful. They require good data- information that is correct, absolute, and easily accessible. If you want to maintain the initial quality of the data as it’s traced, then you can’t expect it to magically fulfill your organization’s needs. This is why Data Governance Consulting is a vital part of the overall data management process.
Significantly, you understand the benefits of data governance (DG) beyond the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. Data governance is compulsory for GDPR, so the inducement in applying it is clear.
The data existing in your organization is a strategic asset. Exactly like your finances and customer relationships, it needs to be managed properly. When sensitive data is disorganized, organizations can face penalties for not fulfilling regulations, growing costs for holding and managing duplicate data, and other expenditures. Moreover, they cannot ensure their business decisions are based on accurate information. To reduce these risks, you need the right data governance strategies in place.
What is Data Governance?
Data governance is described as the management of data to confirm its accuracy as per the requirements, standards, or rules that a specific organization needs for its definite business.
It is a combination of data management applications and processes that help an organization manage its internal and external data flows. By implementing Data Governance, your business can make data quality more efficiently and help secure the accessibility, safety, integrity, and usability of its data assets.
According to Gartner, data governance is the specification of decision rights and an accountability structure to make sure the suitable behavior in the assessment, creation, consumption, and control of data and analytics.
When building your Data Governance strategy, you should customize the data governance definition according to your company’s concerns and goals.
Benefits of an Established Data Governance Strategy
Better Decision-Making
One of the major benefits of data governance is improved decision-making. This is relevant to both the decision-making process and also the decisions themselves.
Well-governed data is more reachable, making it easier for the applicable parties to discover useful insights. It also means decisions will be based on accurate data, ensuring better precision and reliance.
Operational Efficiency
Data is extremely valuable in this digital era of data-driven business. Thus, it should be treated as an important asset. Well-performing manufacturing companies ensure their production-line machinery undertakes regular inspections, maintenance, and upgrades, so the line operates efficiently with limited downtime. The same approach applies to data. Having the right data in hand will help to improve your operational efficiency.
Greater Data Quality
As data governance helps to improve discoverability, businesses with efficient data governance programs also take advantage of improved data quality. Though technically two different initiatives, some of their objectives overlap, for the consistency of data and its consistency. One way to visibly distinguish the two programs is to consider the questions imparted by each field.
Data quality helps to know how useful and absolute data is, whereas data governance helps to know where the data stays and who is accountable for it. Data governance makes data quality better.
Regulatory Compliance
If you haven’t yet implemented a data governance strategy, compliance can be the best reason to do so. GDPR penalties are only incentivizing something you should already be eager to do. Data-driven businesses that have not taken advantage of the above benefits are basically oppressing their own performance.
Increased Revenue
Bringing more revenue should be higher on the Data Governance benefit list. Although the above benefits collectively also influence it. All the advantages of data governance explained above help businesses make better, quicker decisions with more confidence. It means that fewer expensive errors are made, such as fake starts and data violations. It means that you need to spend less money by optimizing risk and finishing the most susceptible gaps in your business’ security, in spite of more money, dealing with PR and financial crises.
Why Data Governance Matters?
Data governance plans are often driven by the requirement of complying with internal policies, regulatory consents, such as SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, frameworks, or standards. But the profit of setting up clear rules and procedures for data-related actions is further than compliance. Here are some of the other general advantages of a well-established data governance program:
- Enhanced security, which is attained by locating critical data, finding out data owners and data users and assessing and reducing risk to critical data
- Better data quality that enables improved business decision-making
- More operational efficiency due to processes and procedures that facilitate faster and simpler data management
- Less data management and storage costs
- Reduced security breaches due to superior training on proper handling of data assets
Implementation Process for Data Governance
The data governance plan can be very intricate and costly to implement. Here are the steps included and the aspects that need special attention.
Step 1– Set up a value statement and create a thorough plan
Step 2– Identify and employ the right people
Step 3– Build a data governance policy
Step 4– Apply the policy
Step 6– Assess growth continuously
Summary
A successful data governance process allows businesses to realize that whether the data they are entering is historical or recent, it will be reliable and functional for data analysis.
Data is an extremely important and strategic raw material for any business. With the elevated volume of data flowing into organizations today, and the diversity of formats, both structured and unstructured, it is vital to get the correct information at the right time to the right people to facilitate the entire organization to develop and take benefit from new opportunities.
If an organization recognizes the full and enduring impact of data as a correct and valued asset and treats it in a steady manner through a whole data governance strategy, they can utilize data intelligently to empower their business for success. Do you need help in creating a long-term data governance strategy for your business? Contact Data Governance Consulting experts for the right guidance, ExistBI has consulting teams in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe.
