How to ensure and promote data health in your organization?

Data management is quite similar to managing one’s health. If you do not pay attention to your health, eventually you will get sick and if you continue neglecting it, then you will suffer from poor health. And this is quite hard to manage unless you are ready to make drastic changes in your lifestyle. Same applies to data – if you do not take care of your organization’s data, in the course of time minor problems will become so serious that a major surgery will be needed. That is to say: re-engineering of your organization’s entire data infrastructure.

Where do the “germs” of an unhealthy data environment come from?

In the first place, without formal responsibility for the data, it can become sick very quickly. Any process that is not well defined or not properly executed can cause significant disturbance. In the core of effective data governance lies the word “right”- right people doing right things at the right time.

Data has to be used by people the way it is intended to be. This means protecting sensitive data and making sure it complies with the rules and regulations set by the government.

And let’s not forget that in the first place such people are needed who can define the data effectively, I.e they should be responsible for the fore-thought of data.

Treating the symptoms of ill data

Many of you can actually name the most common symptoms of data’s deteriorated health. When data can not be trusted, when it needs too much time for manipulating it before you can use it, or if it is hard to get. So, in such cases the people responsible for data governance should be given full rights to do their work. Here we come to the point – that this function, of data governance, or of being a doctor of data, should be given to someone. This function, which may be also called data management or data asset management, needs to exist if you want your organization, and its data, to get healthier.

Change data habits

The first step to bettering data health in your organization is assessment of its present state. Best practices should be defined as well as the opportunities and the appropriate path to achieve them. A good approach to assessing data health is taking the feedback of customers. Many organizations survey their business communities in order to know how they are doing and how they can be more efficient.

To put it short – which is in accordance of what we already mentioned in the beginning – your organization’s data health depends on how well you define, produce and use your data, Therefore improvements to data management are related to change in one or more of these actions.

Start with modeling your data. Organizations that model their data have well-defined data structures. And this results in strong metadata management and efficient database design. On the other hand, metadata management is essential for having strong data health as it provides relevance to the main information system and centre of the organization.

Organizations that are willing to change their data habits and consequently improve data quality should put effort in assessing data sources. Another contributor to the health of data is the control of the entry point of data. In fact, if bad data could be prevented at the entry point itself, then probably all data quality problems would be solved. Data quality can also be evaluated by the above mentioned actions – definition, production and usage. Organizations nowadays put more time, effort and resources in data governance, as they are aware that data quality is the key factor for data health.

Last but not least, assessing your habits of how data is understood, classified and protected, i.e. with how you use data, is critical for enhancing the value your organization gets from using its data. Data must be classified and then the rules for handling each type of data (sensitive, public, etc) should be defined and implemented. In accordance with this comes the protection of your data, especially when it comes to sensitive data. The rules and regulations, related to this, are changing all the time, so the health of your data actually depends on your ability to protect the sensitive information.

If you want to increase the value and the protection of your data, do not hesitate to check out the aspects that Latona Group’s data governance services cover.