A culture of “no” refers to an organizational mindset prioritizing strict controls and governance over speed and innovation. This approach can be resource-intensive, cumbersome, and slow, hindering agility and innovation. It may result in a reluctance to take risks or try new approaches, leading to a lack of flexibility and adaptability in the face of changing business needs.

Transforming a “no” culture into a “yes” culture is crucial for organizations to stay competitive and innovative. By making data accessible using smart data governance, organizations can break down silos, improve collaboration, and enable faster decision-making. Smart data governance ensures that data is accurate, consistent, and secure while also providing users with the necessary access and tools to analyze and act on the data. This approach encourages experimentation, risk-taking, and innovation, leading to a more agile and adaptable organization. A culture of “yes” enables organizations to embrace change, stay ahead of the competition, and drive growth and success. 

In the current information economy, data has become the most valuable asset for organizations, and data-driven strategies are essential for success in any industry. To meet business objectives such as revenue growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction, organizations increasingly rely on data to make decisions.  

However, to provide the data needed for digital transformation, organizations must solve two problems simultaneously:  

• The data must be timely to support speed and accelerate time to market, and… 
• It must also be trustworthy to enable effective decision-making and deliver exceptional customer experiences.  

Unfortunately, most companies struggle to deliver technology initiatives quickly, and ensuring data accuracy and reliability is a significant challenge.  

To address these issues, organizations often prioritize one over the other. Some focus on speed, allowing developers to hand-code integrations or use niche integration tools to get results quickly. Still, this approach is not scalable and creates quality and compliance risks. Others prioritize data trust and establish strict controls and governance, but this can be resource-intensive, cumbersome, and slow, hindering innovation and agility.   

To succeed in the current information economy, organizations must prioritize both speed and data trust. Overcoming the “culture of NO” regarding data governance is crucial to achieving this balance. By embracing a culture of collaboration and innovation, organizations can establish effective data governance practices that enable timely decision-making while ensuring data accuracy and reliability. This approach empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their data assets and drive business success in today’s competitive landscape. 

WHAT IS DATA GOVERNANCE?

Data governance manages an organization’s data assets’ availability, integrity, usability, and security. It involves establishing policies, procedures, and standards for data collection, storage, and use, assigning responsibilities for data management, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. Data governance aims to ensure that data is accurate, consistent, and reliable to support business objectives. 

Data governance is crucial, as organizations can capture vast amounts of internal and external data. It encompasses processes, policies, roles, standards, and metrics that ensure effective and efficient use of information to achieve business goals while managing risks and reducing costs.  

A well-planned data governance strategy defines who can act on what data, in which situations, and using what methods. It provides a common understanding of data, improves its quality, creates a data map, establishes a framework for a single version of the truth, ensures consistent compliance, improves data management, and provides easy access to trusted, secure, compliant, and confidential data. A successful data governance framework covers strategic, tactical, and operational roles and responsibilities. 

WHY DO YOU NEED DATA GOVERNANCE?

Data governance is essential for managing an organization’s growing volume of data assets. This data sprawl is almost impossible to scale. The more data you collect, the less you can meet the promise of self-service. 

Without proper data governance, the sprawl is only valuable for the happy few with the broad skills required to explore the hidden value independently. The others are left behind. 

Moreover, with vast volumes of data coming from everywhere every day, there is no semblance of control.  

When untrustworthy data is accessible to everyone, the sprawl turns into a swamp. 

Data governance’s essence is organizing and delivering reliable data to everybody who needs it. 

Data governance ensures the reliability of all data, efficiently manages it on a large scale, and provides access to those who require it. Now imagine that we can equip individuals with the necessary resources to collaborate, cleanse, extract valuable insights, and present universally trusted data.  

DATA GOVERNANCE IS MANDATORY 

Data governance is essential for every organization as it provides numerous vital benefits for its smooth functioning. These benefits include a collective understanding of data, improved data quality, a data map, a 360-degree view of each customer, consistent compliance, enhanced data management, and easy access to data. With data governance, organizations can ensure that their data is accurate, complete, consistent, and compliant with government regulations and industry requirements. It also establishes codes of conduct and best practices in data management, ensuring that concerns beyond traditional data and technology areas are addressed consistently.

It is vital for compliance. 

Regulatory compliance should not be the only driver for data privacy compliance projects. The goal is to establish trust with customers regarding their personal data. 

MODERN DATA GOVERNANCE STRATEGIES REQUIRE MODERN DATA GOVERNANCE PLATFORMS 

Modern data governance platforms are required for data governance. These platforms should be open source, scalable, and easily integrated with the organization’s existing environment.  

Cloud-based solutions are preferable as they offer cost-efficient and easy-to-use capabilities without the overhead of on-premises servers.  

When selecting data governance tools, choose ones that align with your strategy and help you achieve the desired business benefits. These tools should enable you to capture, understand, and improve the quality of your data, manage it with metadata-driven ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) and ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform) control it with monitoring and documentation, and empower data stewards with self-service tools. 

FIND THE RIGHT DATA GOVERNANCE MODEL FOR YOUR BUSINESS 

Before diving into the challenges of managing and getting value from data, it’s important to address the culture of “no” that sometimes exists within organizations. This culture can hinder data-driven decision-making and prevent employees from accessing necessary data.  

To overcome this, companies must establish a governance model that balances data access with data security and privacy concerns. Choosing the right governance model can ensure that data is managed effectively and that employees have the necessary access to make informed decisions.

However, managing and getting the most value out of data can be challenging. The amount of data companies need to handle is proliferating, with a wide variety of data sources.  This has led to the creation of new data-driven roles within organizations, such as data stewards, data scientists, and data protection officers. Even non-technical employees are becoming more data-savvy and seeking to turn data into insights. The challenge is that data is coming from everywhere, including traditional and new sources like shadow IT and third-party data. Additionally, companies need to analyze real-time data quickly, which is increasing the demand for access to data. However, IT budgets and resources are limited, creating a gap between business expectations and what IT can deliver. This has led to a broken economics of data integration and a widening gap between business and IT when it comes to data ownership. 

PEOPLE NEED ACCESS TO DATA IN NEW AND CREATIVE WAYS

In the past, data hubs were created using highly centralized approaches such as Master Data Management, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and enterprise data warehouses. These approaches relied on a small team of experienced data professionals who followed well-defined methodologies and best practices. This model faces scalability issues as data sprawl becomes more prevalent. 

In the world of data, consumers want to access data in new ways. They want to be able to use data for analytics, machine learning, and other applications. This requires a more decentralized approach to data management, where data is easily accessible and usable by anyone, not just a small team of experts.  

The importance of data “as a product” available for consumers cannot be overstated. To keep up with the demand for data, organizations must adopt a more decentralized approach to data management that empowers consumers to access and use data in new and innovative ways. 

• Is your organization encountering a problem with its data management?  
• Do you lack the resources to distribute the data accurately and quickly to those requiring it?  
• Can you keep up with the increasing demands of business users for diverse and novel data? 

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, your people have already resorted to alternative means to fulfill their data requirements.  IT teams that do not adapt will quickly lose their authority, putting speed, precision, and security at risk. 

A highly centralized approach to data management can lead to a culture of “no” when it comes to data requests from business users. When data is managed by a small team of experts using well-defined methodologies and best practices, it can be difficult to accommodate business users’ diverse and novel data requests.  

A culture of “no” to data requests is detrimental to the organization.  

CONTROL THE DATA PROLIFERATION 

The emergence of Big Data led to adopting a more flexible approach to managing data – the data lake. Unlike the traditional method of starting with data modeling and governance before delving into the actual data, data lakes begin with raw data. This raw data is ingested with minimal upfront costs and stored on basic and inexpensive file systems. There is no need to worry about the file structure at this stage. A structure is created later in the process in what experts call “schema on read,” along with data quality controls, security rules, policies, and controls. This agile approach offers several advantages over the centralized model, including scalability across data sources, use cases, and audiences.  

However, only data-savvy individuals can access raw data, while others require structured data connected to their business context before using it. Therefore, data lakes typically begin with a data lab approach that targets a few data scientists.  

Data ingestion is accelerated by utilizing cloud infrastructure and Big Data, and data scientists can transform data into smart data. The next step is to share this data with a larger audience, which requires more structure. Many organizations create a new data layer for analytics, aimed at the business analyst community. As a result, stronger governance and data quality control must be established to cater to a wider audience with different roles. 

After successfully implementing a data lake, the next step is disseminating information and insights throughout the organization. This can include providing product recommendations to customers through machine learning algorithms embedded in front-office applications or monetizing data to third parties. However, to achieve this, it is essential to establish a layer of governance. This approach has several advantages, including scalability, minimal upfront implementation costs, and easy implementation of changes. Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognize that data governance is essential for digital transformation success. Neglecting this aspect can result in a data swamp, and it may require significant effort to transform the data lake into something that the business can safely utilize. 

ORGANIZING DATA AT SCALE 

Enterprises must establish a disciplined approach to organizing their data at scale, despite the potential for technology to address the issue.  

Traditional data governance needs to be reimagined due to data sprawl. According to Gartner, through 2025, 80% of organizations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they do not take a modern approach to data governance.  

Modern data governance is not solely focused on minimizing data risks and enforcing rules but also on maximizing data usage, requiring a more agile, bottom-up approach.  

This approach involves linking raw data to its business context, taking control of data quality and security, and organizing it for widespread use. New data platforms and smart technologies like pattern recognition and machine learning can facilitate this approach and turn data governance into a collaborative team effort.

 

SMART DATA GOVERNANCE CREATES A CULTURE OF “YES” 

In conclusion, creating a culture of YES through data governance is crucial for organizations to succeed in today’s data-driven world. Organizations can empower their employees to make informed decisions and drive innovation by establishing clear guidelines and processes for data management. Additionally, a culture of YES fosters a collaborative and open environment where individuals are encouraged to share their ideas and insights. A data governance program’s success hinges on individuals’ willingness to embrace it. By promoting a culture of YES, organizations can create a shared sense of purpose and ownership around data, leading to better outcomes and a more resilient organization.