What is Data Governance?
Mike Wake, Head of GDPR Solutions
We have spoken in depth previously about data governance frameworks and the best practice guidelines that should be followed. This insight article will highlight the dangers for organisations failing to effectively manage their data, using mismatched tools and provide solutions to the problems faced.
Manage data more effectively
When it comes to understanding your organisation, having confidence in business data is crucial. An organisation’s business intelligence relies on consistent, high-quality and up-to-date data to make important business decisions, adhere to industry legislation, reduce business risk, design new marketing or sales strategies, or compile reports to demonstrate ROI.
For organisations struggling to manage their data, perhaps due to the sheer volume of data they receive and process, or the lack of more detailed processes, designing an effective data governance framework is essential to upscale operations. This is even more pressing with the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) set to be introduced in May 2018.
Without a data governance framework, organisations’ data can quickly become out-dated, inaccurate and insecure. Data governance ensures that everyone in the business is looking at the same, up-to-date, accurate, high-quality data – improving decision making and mitigating compliance risks.
To help you address your data governance more effectively, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Clean up your data: Create policies and procedures at the point of data capture. This will help you to validate data early on, determine its quality and accuracy – and keep your database up-to-date.
- Assign someone to manage the process: Make someone accountable for the management of data who will enforce data quality control throughout the business and take responsibility for data governance.
Tools to manage data governance
Across an organisation, numerous departments may be operating and collecting data in silos - using different processes and tools - which will ultimately have a negative impact on the organisation's data quality.
In this instance, rather than having individual tools which fail to manage an organisation's data holistically, the integration of sophisticated products and solutions will ensure that information is centralised and aligned with the organisation's data governance policy.
Intelligent data governance solutions can manage data consistency, tracking, workflow, day-to-day administration, data visualisation and create organisation-wide data policies to establish guidelines on data handling.
Also, by deploying a single solution businesses can align departments, create a consistent data capture and management process and meet industry regulations. This results in a reduction of business costs, streamlines procedures and grows overall revenue.
What's the solution?
Modern data governance solutions and platforms deliver holistic data governance, meaning data is being managed and validated across the organisation. For mid-size and large-scale organisations that regularly transfer, store and process data, having an enterprise-grade insight and data governance solution is becoming essential to ensure overall compliance, productivity and efficiency. It helps to overcome weak points in data-related operations, as well as improve processes.
