Leveraging data governance properly on your digital journey

Nathan Olson is a manager on our digital consulting team with experience in advanced data analytics solutions. He uses an innovative and strategic approach to data, working closely with clients to understand their specific needs to guide them to leverage their data and drive business forward.

What is data governance?

Data governance is as broad a topic as data itself. It encompasses all the controls, processes, technology and shared decision making over the management of an organization data. Data governance should not primarily be a function of your information management team, but instead it is a system of checks and balances to empower business stakeholders to get more value out of their data.

Why is data governance so important?

The data your organization owns is likely some of its most valuable assets and organizations need to be treating it as such. To do this, organizations need to monitor whether their data is providing real returns, and guard their data assets against security threats, ensuring the data itself does not become a liability and measuring the value of these assets as they appreciate over time. A robust data governance program can improve the quality of your data, mitigate security risks, increase accessibility to business users and better align the data with your organization's vision.

How do you determine if your organization has proper data governance?

If you manage data, which all organizations do, then you already have data governance – it just may not be formalized. Coordinating and standardizing separate data management efforts can reduce overhead and increase the level of analytics your platform is able to deliver.

It can be helpful to think of data governance in terms of two areas, communications and systems. When it comes to communications around your data assets, you should be asking your organization, some of the following questions:

• How can we better communicate to the business what data assets are available, where they are and how to use them?
• How can we promote data literacy within our organization?
• How can we make sure the individuals responsible for developing and maintaining the data assets understand the needs of the business?

When it comes to the system side, we are talking more about the processes, policies and technology that can bolster the management of data assets. Some of these questions include: