Data Governance

August 25, 2021

Data Governance (DG) maximises the value of diverse data, reduce risk, and control cost

Data Security is becoming the primary concern of organisations. With tightening of Personal Data Protection Acts in every country, companies are turning towards DG to protect, manage, and utilise their data. This can be the data of the entire organization or its digital and/or hard copy assets. Which data comes under the purview of governance must be identified.

Why Data Governance?

DG is an assembly of processes, roles, policies, standards, and metrics. It enables organisations to use the huge data they acquire efficiently and effectively and achieve business goals. Through DG:

1. Companies can establish processes and responsibilities to ensure that the quality and secured data is used across the organization
2. Defines clear rules around who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, using what methods.

Without an effective DG Strategy, data inconsistencies across systems might not get resolved. For example, customer names may be listed differently in sales, logistics, and customer service systems.

Benefits of Data Governance

DG can offer myriad benefits:

• Resolves Data Inconsistencies — It provides a consistent view of data with a common definition and helps avoid data silos within departments and business units.
• Improves Data Quality — Builds a plan to ensure data accuracy through identifying and fixing errors and ensures completeness and consistency.
• Effective Data Mapping — Provides an advanced understanding of the location of all data related to key entities. DG provides an advanced ability to draw sound data navigation maps. So helps organisations make the best use of their data assets, make them usable and achieve business goals.
• Transparency — Ensures a 360-degree view of customers and business entities to create consistency in business activities.
• Compliance — Enforces policies to prevent data error and misuse, and ensure data security. It, therefore, enables companies to meet the mandates of government regulations, in terms of data protection, insurances, and industry-standard requirements.
• Establish best practices in data management — In the highly data-driven world, establishing a code of conduct is required. With these in place, the concerns in areas, such as legal, security, and compliance can be successfully addressed.

Data Custodians

Some key participants and their primary governance responsibilities include:

• Chief Data Officer: Oversees the DG program and is responsible for its success or failure at a high level. CDO secures approval, funding, and staffing for the DG program and leads the DG implementation process, monitors progress, and acts as its internal advocate.
• DG Manager and Team: Coordinate the process, lead meetings and training sessions, track metrics, manage internal communications to carry out other management tasks.
• Data Stewards: Oversee data sets and keep them in order. They also ensure that the policies and rules are implemented and ensure compliance.

Implementation

Implementation involves these steps:

1. Finalisation of data structures
2. Data standards are developed along with the DG policies and data usage rules.
3. Controls and audit procedures are set up as per internal policies and external regulations to guarantee consistent use of data across applications
4. Documentation on where data reside or come from and data protection and security rules

Best Practices

The strictures of DG on its handling and use may create confusion and controversy in organisations. Therefore, the DG best practices need to be implemented right at the outset to avoid such controversies. A proper evaluation and staff training are important to establish the industry best practices on DG.

Our BI Offerings

DBP’s BI Solutions on Power BI and/or Tableau gives you better business insight to help you step up your decision making. DBP helps establish the best practices in your organization by identifying what data needs to be controlled, the best strategy to be adopted, and its benefits.

Interested to discuss more, please feel free to contact the author at ashish.bhalla@dbp.com.sg

About Ashish Bhalla

Ashish has almost 30 years of industry experience in a wide range of business solutions primarily focusing on end-to-end customer experience management. He is the founder and CEO of Digital Business People (DBP), an omni-channel customer experience management company headquartered at Singapore with it’s development and delivery centres in India.