10.17.2022 Executive Data Bytes – Bringing your data to life with data governance

Executive Data Bytes

Tech analysis for the busy executive.

Welcome to another edition of Executive Data Bytes! This week, we are breaking down data governance. Put simply, it is a set of processes that bring meaning to an organization's data.

Focus piece: “How data governance builds business value”

Executive Summary

Data is the world's most valuable resource, but few organizations know how to manage it with the same level of care they use for other financial and physical assets, such as real estate, machinery, inventory, and more. This Fivetran Blog explains how your organization can create value by moving to a value-driven mindset.

Key Takeaways

• A data governance program is essential for protecting sensitive data and adhering to privacy regulations. It can also improve how people use, analyze and share data across the company.
• To transform data into knowledge, organizations need to use active metadata, which is data that defines other data. This context powers data discovery, data quality, data lineage impact analysis, and detection of personally identifiable information (PII).
• Advanced analytics models learn without explicit instructions, so if your data is not well-managed, the models will only magnify your issues. For example, IBM's Watson for Oncology had trouble delivering useful and reliable recommendations because of the inconsistency and messiness of the source data.
• Poor data management is a major reason that 87% of data science models do not make it into production. By managing their data better, companies can realize more value from their significant investment in analytics.
• Companies like Apple are starting to use personal data privacy as a unique selling proposition. By making compliant data easier to access, leaders can ensure that their teams can make faster decisions and drive operational efficiency at scale.

Focus piece: “Top benefits of data governance for businesses”

Executive Summary

If you want to figure out who your most profitable customers are, you have to gather data from around the enterprise and make sure your sales teams have correctly identified which operations are part of the broader entity. This TechTarget article explains how effective data governance can improve your organization.

Key Takeaways

• Data governance is the process of developing internal data standards and policies, and enforcing them to ensure that data is accurate, consistent and used properly.
• Most large companies have data silos that contain inconsistent data and can't be accessed by users throughout the organization.
• If you have well-governed data and the ability to do business analytics with it, you can improve operational efficiency in many areas, such as targeting marketing and sales investments and understanding product profitability.
• Despite significant IT investments, maintaining good data quality remains an intractable problem. A good start is to create a data quality mindset and regularly audit and measure data quality levels as part of the governance process.
• High-performing companies take data governance more seriously than other organizations, and this is why their data governance strategy helps them identify and prioritize important data assets.

Focus piece: “Tips & Tricks for Implementing Data Governance to Drive Business Results” 

Executive Summary

Every business today has access to data, but are they using it to optimize their results? Implement suitable processes to ensure data flows smoothly through your organization. To be fully profitable, an organization must know how to select, collect, store and use its data effectively. Pick up a few tips and tricks to help you drive results in this MartechSeries article.

Key Takeaways

• Companies need to start by interviewing employees to better understand the current data situation, determine specific organizational requirements, conduct practical workshops, and analyze real use cases to generate interest and launch a data governance project.
• In today's data-driven organization, data governance should be implemented and supported across all business units. A chief data officer may be responsible for data governance throughout the company.
• To successfully implement a data governance project, companies must establish standard processes, adopt a common language, and provide a comprehensive topography of all the data collected and used by the company.
• In a data-driven organization, the quality of the data steers most of your decisions. To ensure the quality of the data, put in place effective methodologies and tools to orchestrate and document the data collection process.

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