Data Governance and Business Strategy
How much of your data assets are being effectively used? What is the portion of all your data asset that are generating business value at all? Are your data secure enough? Does your data has the suitable quality to be trustworthy across all sectors of the organization and for all its consumers? How to optimize costs knowing what and how much data needs to be analytically enriched? Who produces what data and who consumes what data for what purpose?
Governance offer the means of answering it continuously and provides the methods and tools for improving the data landscape in its whole!
All those strategical and business oriented questions and many more are less difficult to answer when a data governance program and culture are running. Therefore, data governance is business strategy in its core. Not convinced yet? Let’s dive a little bit more.
In one hand data governance is a conjunction of guides, best practices, frameworks, processes and technology associated with the art of managing and steering data flow, storage and usage by the means of the observation of ethical and good technical parameters.
In the other hand, business strategy is a set of plans, goals and actions leading how a business might thrive in a particular landscape. Data Work is an universe in itself, too large and complex to be effectively run without proper steering in the long run.
On both a more general strategic and a more daily work level, data governance strategy creates bridges between people, process, technology and business goals. It does it all by facilitating the daily interactions with a grammar and a syntax (a formal logic approach) establishing an environment where responsibilities, accountability, processes, standards and policies are (ideally) fully and transparently shared across all the organization data pipelines.
Considering the fact that good data is crucial for data driven business strategy success, and that data work is too large and complex: we can draw from it that data governance strategy is as crucial as good data assets. Therefore, data governance and business strategy are not distant universes at all. In fact, a real data driven scenario requires data governance. Because data governance drives data quality and efficiency which leads to better business impacts rewarded from analytical data usage.
In short: data governance = better data = better business
At nowadays economy and society, data driven organizations might be more self-conscious of its reality and, therefore, of its possibilities for the future. What to do better, what to stop doing, what to modify and so forth.
However, in order to improve its organizational self-reflection, data-driven organizations need to produce and consume quality data. Therefore contemporary complex big data systems needs data governance in order to guarantee the quality and trustworthy of data.
The equation is very simple: the more one organization anchors its decision making processes in data oriented culture, the more one organization needs trusted and quality data, therefore, good processes and efficient management, here enters data governance: a plethora of practices and models for properly govern data products and its systems assuring data driven organizations adequate material to reason by and to know thy self while generating more business value and assuring the strategy.