What is data governance?

In today’s fast-moving environment, there is a lot of data all around us. Now, organizations can improve their operations, reduce costs and maximize their value, with a proper process of managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data.

But, according to Teradata’s recent Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey, over 80% of marketers feel data is the most underutilized asset of their organization.

One of the common problems we find is company departments cannot create a unified naming convention strategy (taxonomy), for their products, customers, or any information related to the company. 

As a result, their data integrations show inconsistencies with the information, and all the processes become complicated, and the data is often inaccurate.

To avoid this, you need to implement effective data governance.

But what is it? Data governance is a set of processes that will ensure the best use of the information that the organization has access to. With effective data governance, you will have consistent data that you can trust.

Benefits of data governance:

• Data becomes an asset: You can make the best business decisions based on the information you get, and develop a data-driven organization.
• Optimize operations: You can align your business’ efforts and bring out your best practices.
• Improve your products or services: Proper data governance can show you what the customer likes or not about your products or services; therefore, it allows you to improve based on their needs.
• Create new products or services: You might think that you already have enough; but what if the customer wants more products or services from you? 
  

What do we need to create effective data governance?

1. Document: Define the data distribution about internal and external information, so there could be better searchability, accessibility, likability, and compliance in the documentation.
2. Manage: Develop data assets that you can trust to serve multiple purposes.
3. Understand: It’s not about collecting data, but understanding it, analyzing it, and improving your business activities. 
4. Optimize: Validation, cleansing, and enrichment of the data will help you increase the data quality.
   

Now that you have a taste of the theory, you need to implement data governance in your company. Who’s your data governor? Every organization is unique, but you need to adapt a data governance strategy, from the Senior management down to all workers, and make it useful and available for each of your employees. Not sure how to do it? Let us know if you need help to create an effective data governance strategy and how data governance works. Contact us.

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