Governing your centralised data
No doubt the use of digital technologies in our working lives have multiplied- from CRMs, Business intelligence tools to HRIS and project management tools to name few. And along with them the data they generate.
Did you know? According to Statista there are an estimated 181 zettabytes of data that will be generated worldwide by 2025. To put that into perspective, one zettabyte is the equivalent of streaming Netflix continuously for thirty-six million years.
With volume of data growth at such staggering levels, ensuring that the data being collected, stored, and used throughout an organisation is accurate, consistent, dependable, and relevant is not a nice-to-have but a must.
In this blog we will explore how to govern your data within a centralised insights platform.
If you want to learn more about building a centralised insights platform that is agile and flexible, check out our blog The key to building a flexible centralised insights platform.
What are centralised insights & why do they need governing?
Every data transformation journey begins with organisations trying to map out how various data assets flow through the business. Once the various data journeys are mapped, understood and documented they create a path for centralised reporting and in-depth insights. The end product of this journey is what we will refer to as “centralised insights” in this blog.
Organisations undertake the journey to centralise their insights with a goal to enhance their decision making. When decisions are made based on internal and external sources of information, the overall credibility of decision making is enriched.
As data becomes central to an organisation’s decision making, it’s imperative to incorporate governance as part of the centralised insights platform. This includes both governing data and visualisation. The key to achieving traceable and transparent decision-making lies in creating robust governance practises.
Building robust data governance practises
The main reason organisations choose to create centralised insights is to alleviate the pain of manually manipulating numbers as it makes harder to ascertain their accuracy which eventually leads losing trust in the numbers reported.
Imagine undertaking a whole data transformation journey to centralise your data assets and gearing the organisation to use the centralised insights instead of manual and siloed data blocks. You successfully managed to make data core in decision making and people’s way of using it, so the last thing that you would want is for stakeholders to lose trust in the newly formed centralised insights platform due to poor governance of the data. To restore confidence, governing the platform that generates reports is crucial.
A robust governance framework should achieve the following:
Accountability – Holds people accountable for the data points they are responsible for, whether as a creator, producer, or practitioner.
Transparency – Ensure translations or transformations within the centralised insights platform is transparent and easily understood by stakeholders.
Consistency – Establishes consistency in format, value, and definition of each data attribute across different departments.
Quality – Implements a quality framework and reports on inconsistent data to accountable stakeholders for correction.
Rules and Regulations – Adheres to industry standard rules and regulation that it is consistently applied across all systems forms part of this component.
Is your organisation currently missing out on these benefits due to lack of data governance or do you suspect your current governance practises are not up to mark? Ei Square can help! Whether you need an audit of the current framework or plan to implement an new one, we can help you on your journey- give us a call today.
Benefits of Data Governance:
Implementing governance frameworks is more than just about compliance and maintaining data integrity. Without a robust governance framework in place, even the most well-intentioned centralised insights platform risks becoming a house of cards built on shaky data foundations.
It’s a strategic investment with longer term benefits like:
Trust – As a result of implementing data governance, data quality takes precedence, ensuring standards, procedures and best practices are followed and put in place. This results in fewer misrepresentation and miscommunication of the data fostering trust in the organisation.
Adoption – With trust, quality and ease of use, the transition to adopting a centralised insights platform becomes easier.
Robust decision-making – As the use of high quality, consistent and trustworthy data in practice builds up, data as part of decision-making becomes the norm. Your stakeholders become the data champions within your organisation.
Traceability – From a regulatory and audit perspective, this ticks the largest box for an organisation with properly implemented data governance framework. Highly regulated industries are often subject to audits by regulated body so having a framework of reference that shows the entire data journey and their translation before it ends up in a report, provides traceability for the auditors and enforces rules, policies, and procedures into practice.
Improved efficiency – Having consistency and accuracy of data helps prevent different departments from individually maintaining their data assets, thereby reducing duplication of unnecessary efforts while ensuring access to up-to-data.
Better Risk Management – With greater visibility of the various data assets and related processes, organisations have a better understanding of the provenance of data, access controls, usage patterns, and vulnerabilities. With this information, organisations become better in managing risks and are quick to remedy in case of any breach.
How centralised insights make application of data governance easier
Imagine your organisation has made a transformative journey in how everyone uses and access information that is relevant to them. They have created a platform that provides insights centrally to the whole organisation, captures the data centrally as well as makes sure people who access the data that is relevant to them.
You might think that this mass amalgamation of information might make it harder to administer. In reality, it’s quite the opposite!
Let’s take a closer look at how this central data repository helps organisations to govern the data more efficiently and enhances their data driven decision making.
Ensure and Enforce Data Quality
With a central data repository of cross functional data, it is easier to ensure consistency and completeness of data attributes within different systems. Consequently, this makes reporting data quality issues to the accountable stakeholders easier to manage which results in speedy resolutions
METADATA MANAGEMENT
Metadata management is a collection of policies, procedures, and systems that are used to administer data that describe other data. It is like a blurb or contents catalogue in a library that lists books and describes the book by genre, author, and title. Central repository helps in maintaining the metadata as governance tools scan ingested data and data processing for changes in content and context and enables systems, processes, or people to update or create new metadata.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI)
Automation of data classification, data quality and rule-based associations are easily implemented in a central repository as they provide built-in tools and features that support this. Acts as a unified environment for creating machine learning models to look for deviations from expected values, suggestions to improve standardisation and consistency.
Data Cataloguing
Cataloguing the journey of data sourced from various locations of an organisation becomes easier. For instance, stakeholders from different business functions but spread geographically or stakeholder who use different systems but work within the same business function - central storage of data will enable a consistent way to catalogue their data
Data stewardship
Having the right people oversee data through formalised stewardship roles enhances data quality which enhances trust in your insights. Data stewards are typically experts in a domain and take responsibility for processes that ensure effective control of data assets. All data stewards investigate a unified single platform which drives your centralised insights and that makes communication easier.
Secured Data Access
As departments access to data and reporting is centralised, who needs access to what is easily governed from the platform. Statista mentions that 70% of employees have access to data they should not. In governing a centralised insights platform, the access restriction is limited to one platform, and this makes it easier to govern.
How to govern visualisations in centralised insights?
As the name suggests building data governance is the core activity, however centralised platforms also encompass a critical visualisation component. To truly govern the whole platform, organisations must extend their governance efforts to the visual elements as well.
The following components are a good starting point in governing the visual layer of your centralised insights platform.
Content Delivery Approach
A key aspect to govern is planning how insights, reports, and content will be delivered to users. Will it be self-served or centrally controlled? The governance responsibilities will differ based on the chosen delivery method. For self-service visualisations, governance falls under the purview of the business teams, whereas centrally controlled content is typically governed by the BI or IT teams.
Control Access to visual elements
Governance must extend to controlling the depth and breadth of transactional data access within reports and visualisations. Access should be restricted based on who needs to view what specific data elements. Creating access control modules, workspace permissions, or row-level security (RLS) will ensure that users only see the appropriate data subset within their reports.
To sum up
With the ever-increasing use of technology and the data it generates, organisations often undertake data transformation initiatives to become more data informed. This process enhances their data maturity and establishes robust decision-making capabilities. Frequently, this results in the creation of a single repository of multi-faceted data that supports their reporting and insights capabilities. As stakeholders grow accustomed to having a centralised platform for all their data needs, effective governance of this data becomes essential.
Establishing frameworks for data quality and reporting delivery should be integral to the governance of the transformed centralised insights platform. Beyond understanding how data is used and who has access to it, robust data governance is crucial, especially in highly regulated industries. The ability to demonstrate data lineage from source to regulatory reports in a traceable and transparent manner helps ensure adherence to rules and regulations, thereby minimising risk and maintaining compliance.
Is your organisation part of a highly regulated industry that is subject to frequent audits? Don’t risk non-compliance! Get support from our experienced consultants to stay on top of governance practises. Book a consultation using the link below.