By 
Data governance (DG) is the process of managing all data within a corporation so that it is monolithic and usable to all parts of the organization. All too often, data is siloed into different compartments of an organization. This siloing keeps data from being used in a systematic and unified fashion within your company. Governance of data begins with a data governance framework that is put in place by a DG committee. This committee will have representation from stakeholders in all departments of your company.
Why Do We Need Governance of Data? –
According to Profisee, data governance has some very important benefits:
- All of your teams will have access to high quality data from which to conduct analytics to improve functioning within all departments
- There will be better documentation for regulatory purposes of your data, its lineage and access controls in place. This will help your company comply with regulations and avoid fines.
- Data security will be improved by having data owners
- Since data is more accessible and there are data stewards who will be able to better help users access and understand the data, better analytics will improve business profits.
- Data quality will be improved as a part of the work of the DG team
- Data will not have to be restructured and cleansed each time a different team needs access to the data. Data will have a structure and organization that will be designed to work for all departments.
Tips to Improve Governance of Data –
DG Team – According to Information Week, the first step in good governance of data is to have an executive who is the DG evangelist, a Chief Data Officer and a DG team. They suggested that all members of the team be senior members of your staff, represent different departments and that they all be committed to find out what the data problems are. When the DG team can articulate the problems with the current data system, it will be easier to get the rest of the staff on board for the change because the rest of the staff will be looking for solutions to the current data problems.
Prioritize Your Efforts – Profisee reminds us that creating a data governance framework for the entire corporation is a huge task. It will not happen all at once. Find the places where change will create larger outcomes. This will energize the DG team and get the other staff members on their side.
Measure and Report Changes – Information Week speaks of the importance of keeping track of the changes with documentation. Changes need to be measured. They also stated that these improvements need to be articulated to staff in ways that they can comprehend, not in the vernacular of the IT department.
Create Quality Data – Forbes speaks of the most important benefit of governance of data – business intelligence and analytics. One of the key roles of your DG team must be to look carefully at the data. Pieces of data that are not correct, corrupted or incomplete need to be fixed. Also, the team needs to establish if there are other pieces of data that are not currently being gathered that need to be collected as well. You cannot have quality business analytics with incomplete, garbled data.
These few tips to better governance of data will begin the journey for your company. You will need a highly committed DG team and an executive who can articulate the need and their progress. You will have to start small but with higher priority goals first. The data itself must be corrected and possibly expanded to glean what is needed by all of the stakeholders. These steps will get companies off to a good start into better governance of data with the end goal being better system-wide analytics and decision-making.
Comments