Strategic

Thinking of your data as a Strategic Asset will help Data Governance and your business

To implement Mindful Data Governance and have it become part of your business’s culture, the mindset of everyone in the business must believe that the data that your business is collecting is not just an asset but a strategic asset. Changing this mindset I think is extremely important and making sure the entire business understands and believes in the importance of collecting high quality data. Collecting poor quality data effects so many things within the business such as financial decisions being made by the business, marketing messages going out to customers, and which products or services are performing well and the ones that are not. These are just a very small sample of areas that will be effected by poor data quality, remember GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT.

A huge reason Data Governance should be part of your business culture is because the strategic data that is being collected does not format itself and cannot automatically identify where it is at. To satisfy the four major reasons of data governance availability, usability, integrity, and security the business must think of it’s data as a strategic asset and that way of thinking will have a huge impact not only on the success of implementing of your Mindful Data Governance Initiative but sustaining the data governance as it becomes part of your business culture. Data Governance is never finished because new sources, uses, and regulations about data are never finished. With self service bi getting more and more popular within businesses, the important of data governance as being part of your business culture will ensure users of self service BI will see the right data in the right way, to generate business insights correctly and make sound business decisions.

Remember data is a strategic asset and thinking this way the idea of data governance becomes natural.

Benefits of Data Governance

Benefits of Data Governance

There are many benefits of Data Governance and I 100 percent believe it is a requirement in todays business world not just a nice to have. I have been asked by business owners as well as C Level executives can they afford to implement Data Governance in their business? My response back to them is can you afford not to do implement data governance in your business? Cost is almost always the reason businesses do not implement data governance and that is why I developed the Mindful Data Governance Initiative, to get them over that first hurdle of worrying about cost. Alright lets jump into the benefits of data governance.

Benefits of Data Governance

  • Improved data understanding. It really gets the entire business on the same page with the data. Data governance provides a consistent view of, and common terminology for, data, while each department retains the appropriate flexibility.
  • Better decision making. Another enormous benefit of data governance is better decision-making. This applies to both the decision-making process, as well as the decisions themselves. Data governance is more discoverable, making it easier for the entire business to find useful insights. It also means decisions will be based on the better quality data, ensuring greater accuracy and trust.
  • Regulatory Compliancy. This is another huge reason to implement the Mindful Data Governance Initiative in your business, there are hefty fines related to not following the guidelines and specifications around business process and data within different industries.
  • Huge improvement on data quality. As data governance helps in discoverability, businesses with effective data governance initiatives also benefit from improved data quality. Although technically two separate initiatives, some of their goals overlap. Data quality wants to know how useful and complete data is, whereas data governance wants to know where the data is and who is responsible for it.
  • Gain revenue. Driving revenue up happens because of all the benefits that are above. All the benefits above all the business to be more data driven, have better data quality, and allow the business to treat their data to what it actually is an asset of the business.
  • To be truly a DATA DRIVEN business DATA GOVERNANCE is a MUST

    Mindful Data Governance Initiative – Identifying Data Domains

    From my last blog we have learned about some of the roles and responsibilities that should play within Mindful Data Governance, now we need to identify the data domains. Before we can start to look at formalizing the nonstandard data governance practices that are going on within your business today we need to identify the different data domains. Simply put all you are doing is identifying the systems (transactional) that are collecting data about the business and the consumers. For example data domains could be referencing product, consumer, vendors, finance, hr and logistic information.

    Looking at the above example each of these data domains can contain:

    • Data owners
    • Business glossaries
    • Data dictionaries
    • Business processes
    • Data catalogs
    • Reports catalogs
    • Data quality scorecards
    • Systems and applications
    • Policies and standards

    The best way to start to identify data domains is simply start looking at the business needs or problems. For example lets say that a Client has need to be able to increase customer experience, to be able to up-sell while a customer is buying a different product, and to control over validating customer’s needs.

    Requirements such as these, were tied to the business problem our client was facing: they had to control visibility and understanding around its customers. Data was spread across multiple systems and applications with no defined ownership. We helped create ownership by identifying key stakeholders, business processes, and datasets related to the customer domain and established control around its lifecycle. The idea is to have a clear understanding of where data comes from, who owns it, and when changes are made, who should be involved.

    Remember when implementing the Mindful Data Governance Initiative you do not have to implement all the data domains at once, in fact I highly suggest that you do not do that. Assign a number to your data domains in the order that the business would like those data domains to be implemented and then follow that. Mindful data governance is about implementing data governance in phases and not to create a disturbance in your business. Mindful Data Governance will increase your data quality, accessibility, usability, security and availability.