Business organizations gather and process large amounts of data for various analytics and decision making purposes. Business data is vital to plan for the future, make your business progressive and earn more revenue. With the help of data entry services, any amount of data can be accurately converted into digital format. In this age of Big Data, it has become increasingly important for every business to have the ability to process, manage, analyze and utilize data and to ensure efficient data governance. Data governance is the process whereby an organization’s information assets are formally, appropriately, proactively and efficiently managed throughout the enterprise. To ensure efficient data governance, you must have in place a set of laws comprising strategies, procedures, policies, technology and communication that are designed to improve and optimize your data assets.
According to studies done on data and its use in various organizations, only less than half of an organization’s structured data is used in decision making and only less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. More than 80% of employees have access to data they should not, and 85% of analysts’ time is spent simply realizing and organizing the data. Proper organizing, governing, analyzing and deploying of data are essential for good data management, and good data management needs good data governance.
Data governance focuses on making the right data available and easily accessible when needed; and ensuring that the data is of good quality, accurate, secure and actionable.
What are the important data governance processes?
- Identify and chart out the scope of the program
- Create new ways to enhance data quality and security
- Develop and manage metadata
- Educate the staffs and improve their data literacy
- Research and integrate new data sources
- Assess the suitability of new data sources
- Scrutinize and implement compliance with data policies
- Facilitate new data-driven opportunities for improvement
Data Governance and GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to regulate management of sensitive personal data and ensure efficient data governance. With the advent of GDPR, data governance has become important for all organizations as it is one of the requirements of GDPR. One should ensure data accuracy and data integrity in what information is stored where on the system. The best way to keep track of data is data repository. It helps organizations consolidate the information and also meet GDPR requirements. Organizations must include data governance to address multiple data privacy regulations with various intricacies and impact. This will help build and incorporate data modelling, data lineage, process modelling and metadata collaboration from a global perspective across businesses.
Best Practices for Data Governance
- Consider the human factor, the right tools and technology: Effective data governance requires the participation and integration of employees, processes and technology and these factors should be kept in mind while developing your data governance strategy. Finding the right tools and technology helps to ensure success.
- Ensure business goals are measurable: Setting goals that are measurable is important for any business organization. This is especially important when you have external shareholders who may expect verifiable results for the investments they make. Key performance indicators and metrics are necessary to track the progress of a program and also ensure that you find ways to improve these with a view to the future.
- Provide a clear view of the benefits to be gained: For efficient data governance, you need the contribution and approval of executives across your organization. For this you should be able to provide a clear view of the tangible benefits the program can bring. The aspects to highlight are increased revenue, improved operational efficiency, and better customer experience.
- Ensure good communication: This is important for any business process and also for flawless data governance.
- Make necessary modifications and enhancements regularly: Data governance is a continuous process. As such, you need to introduce necessary modifications and improvements as and when required. If you do not, it would compromise all the effective practices you have built up.
What are the benefits of implementing effective data governance practices?
- With better data understanding, data systems, procedures and policies can be standardized more easily
- Improved quality of data
- Ensure compliance with all applicable data regulations including GDPR
- Data lineage factors ensure more transparency for all data processes
- Reduced costs associated with data management
- Improved operational efficiency facilitated by a better capability to plan and implement strategies
- Reduced errors and therefore improved revenue
For any business organization, a good data governance policy is important to ensure traceability and clarity. For good data governance, the available data, whether electronic or paper-based, must be compiled and organized effectively. It is here that the services of data entry companies become indispensable. Today, with the significance of Big Data, most business organizations rely heavily on data cleansing services to eliminate old and redundant data and maintain relevant, actionable data in their data repositories. This helps them ensure flawless data analytics and data governance that are so important for business growth and brand recognition.
