Possessing data is not enough – govern it intelligently

Data governance is a requirement in today’s highly competitive enterprise environment. It would actually be correct to say that data governance is not a matter of option. It is a must for every organization dealing with large amounts of data. The management, as well asthe proper usage of the information across an organization is what leads to success. Data governance ensures that the data is trusted, secure, compliant and easy to find within your organization.

Data governance is no longer optional

In recent years data governance has been rapidly evolving. Unlike before, when it was considered mainly as an IT function for classifying and cataloging information, which was not really used, nowadays it is a must for every enterprise. Later on, organizations realized that they could benefit and extract value from all the data they were creating and storing. Data governance systems help enterprises in reducing costs, managing risks and increasing revenues by simply putting to use the data they possess.

In a 2017 study IDC predicted that global data would grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025. This means one trillion gigabytes. Undoubtedly, these large amounts of data provide numerous benefits, but along with this they bring a number of challenges too.

In 2018, as the Wall Street Journal put it, there was a global reckoning on data governance. There were massive data breaches at organizations which resulted in dramatic reputational and financial decline.

So, after all this data drama occurred, it was confirmed that data government is no longer optional. It underpins security, compliance and privacy.

Data intelligence

A simple explanation of data intelligence is the ability to transform data into knowledge. On one hand, it is the next evolutional step of data governance. It connects data management and governance to form a better understanding of collected information. By delivering valuable insights it helps companies improve services, investments and customer experiences.

IDC states that without data intelligence companies are wasting up to 12 working hours per week, that is when data is not delivered to the right resource at the best time.

Data alone does not distinguish the enterprise — how the enterprise is enabled by data is the differentiator. Data enablement requires governance and governance requires data intelligence to deliver the right data to the right resource at the best time.

In fact, enterprises spend more time looking for their data than making use of it. The 80/20 rule is still prevalent in organizations. This means that 80% of the time is spent on data discovery and preparation, and only 20% goes for analytics and producing results.

Intelligent data governance

If your business aspires towards gaining more value of its data, these few steps will help you create the basis of your data intelligence program or strategy.

In the first place, identify all the aspects of the organization’s data management structure. You should be aware how and where information is stored and how it moves through the different levels of the enterprise.
Then capture and centralize metadata from various sources.
Analyze how different data elements and sources come together to satisfy various business demands.
Govern data – apply all procedures and regulations, related to privacy, compliance, security, proper usage of data.
Last but not least, here comes unification. Manage access to a unified view into the content and control of your data infrastructure.

In the end, let’s make it clear that a company’s success is not measured by the amount of data it gathers. It very much (not to say thoroughly) depends on how well the organization uses this data.

So, if you want to make use of all the data you possess, to make it consistent and compliant, to better security and mitigate risk, check out which aspects are covered by Latona Group’s data governance related services.