Data democratization is about business-wide data accessibility for a wider range of roles. Our most recent research, “Data democratization: How a data-driven culture is key to organizational success” dives into the concept of data democratization and the importance of underpinning DataOps and data literacy to reap success.
If you have a question on data democratization, DataOps, or data literacy, you may be able to find your answer here. We took a deep dive into five frequently asked questions.
1. It can be difficult to justify investment in data tools in today’s economic climate. Can you explain what ROI I will see to my business by prioritizing and investing in data democratization?
If you are democratizing accurate data, and your efforts are underpinned by data literacy and DataOps, then there’s a high chance you will see an improved ROI. Our study found that data democratization results in better and faster decisions, operational efficiency, and improved customer experience—but you and your end users need to have trust in your data. So, how do you get there?
Experian can validate, append, and enrich your contact data in real-time or batch cleanse, depending on what is best for your company’s goals. Validated data will ensure you and your team are leveraging trustworthy insights across the entire business.
2. My business has buy-in from our CEO to prioritize data usage across our business, but due to the amount of data we collect and store, we are unsure where to start. Is there a baseline checklist that can help?
Businesses who are encouraging business-wide data usage are improving their data quality and transparency, while also using improved technology that is easy to use.
We recently shared these five tips on how to encourage data usage across your organization:
1. Address the challenges.
2. Build trust in your data (see question 1).
3. Teach data skills (see question 3).
4. Give real life data examples.
5. Highlight the benefits.
The reality is that you are asking your team to make a cultural shift in how they obtain information and leverage it to drive decision-making—which is not an easy request, nor does it happen overnight. This is why you need to ensure senior leadership buy-in, strong communication, and training support.
3. I’m interested in building a data literacy program. How do I get started?
Data literacy is a key component to the success of data democratization. Our most recent study unveiled 89 percent of business leaders say operationalizing data literacy across the business will help organizations leverage higher quality data and more quickly see ROI from data initiatives.
Read the research.
To get started, consider these four key areas.
1. Program ownership. Our study found that, depending on the resources you have on hand, ownership of a data literacy program will land with a chief data officer, IT, or HR.
2. Target audience. The audience could be data professionals and IT to business users, according to our research.
3. Resources. Some resources business leaders consider are access to online training portals, informal internal training, formal training from consultants, and ad-hoc support from specialized data experts.
4. Scalable program. To kick off your data literacy program, you may start with a pilot program and small assignment. As next steps, business leaders consider developing a formal plan, adding data literacy to standard employee training programs, or customized programs.
4. Can you give a scenario where DataOps is used within a business, and what tools could enable DataOps across my organization?
DataOps is about bringing agility and speed to your data practices. It’s important to remember that DataOps is a discipline that is adopted and improved over time—it’s not a specific tool or one-time project.
When you consider a scenario where DataOps is used, think about the time you’ve submitted a request to your data or IT team and a dashboard was created that gave you a view into specific data points. However, you want to see that data evolve as you consider new trends and yet, there is no feedback loop or ability to argue with that insight in real-time. This is where DataOps comes in—building a data infrastructure and pipeline that allows you to iterate quickly on what your data is telling you.
Although DataOps is a principle and not a tool, technology plays a key role when determining your data infrastructure and pipelines. Consider your data quality management tool and determine which capabilities are easy to use and agile in how they will allow you to repeat data workflows.
As a tip, you should be able to easily profile data, adjust workflows, and have collaboration capabilities built into your practices.
If you don’t have a data quality management solution, consider Experian’s Aperture Data Studio. This solution is user-friendly, intuitive, and encourages collaboration between users.
5. I want to start democratizing data across my department. Are there tools that I can implement to support a successful data democratization strategy?
Data democratization is about getting a wider range of roles access to data insights. To support your strategy, our study found that business leaders consider multiple solutions that could help make data more readily available to business users.
Businesses are using tools like data quality, data preparation, business intelligence, data governance applications, and even Excel. Since the point of data democratization is to get data into the hands of non-technical users in additional to IT and data roles, ensuring the tool is user-friendly is critical to seeing success.
Experian is here to help you provide high-quality data to even more employees across your business through best-in-class, user-friendly data management technology.
