Data governance is a crucial component of the success of any business’s data management strategy, ensuring that data remains accurate, valuable, and in compliance with regulations.
What is data governance?
Data governance is a process to ensure data meets precise standards and business rules as it is entered into a database and is used throughout an organization. Data governance enables businesses to exert control over the management of data assets. This process encompasses the people, process, and technology that are required to ensure that data is fit for its intended purpose.
Businesses require accurate data to inform their daily operations. Brands use data to send their customers the latest promotions. Ecommerce sites rely on data to provide customers with targeted recommendations. Banks use data to prevent fraud and protect customer information. These businesses all rely on data governance to keep these functions running smoothly.
Why is data governance important?
Data governance is important for many organizations and industries, especially those that have regulatory compliance, like those in finance and insurance. To achieve compliance, organizations are required to have formal data management processes in place to govern their data throughout its lifecycle.
Maintaining an effective data governance strategy is essential for your organization, even past regulatory compliance. When your data meets quality standards, it is more useful for informing your business practices and future steps. Data-driven organizations do more than hold onto and store data– they use that data to make new decisions and reach their customers, which is impossible without quality data.
Data governance plays an essential role in maintaining the accuracy of data in your organization. Without accurate data, your decision-making will be based on incorrect information, wasting time and resources. After all, you cannot jump from a weak foundation. Data governance helps keep that foundation strong.
What are the benefits of data governance?
With data governance processes, your organization does more than follow regulations, it also guarantees quality data. For businesses trying to achieve growth and success in today’s world, data quality is vital.
Keep data valuable
If left unchecked, the value of data as a business asset erodes and confidence in its accuracy and usability decreases. Over time, data can become outdated and incorrect, leaving your organization with useless data points. Data governance factors in systems to keep this data up to date and free from errors.
Gain a competitive advantage
More proactive companies in less regulated industries have recognized that embracing
data governance can give them a competitive edge. This is especially true of companies whose main commodity is or relies on data, like media companies. Data-based decision-making helps companies make better, more informed decisions than others.
Improve the customer experience
Avoid poor data that results in customers experiencing poor service. Data governance keeps your data correct and reliable, allowing you to reach your customers by mail or email, provide them with useful information and promotions, and even communicate with them better during customer service interactions.
Stay in compliance
Falling out of compliance is a massive risk. Out-of-compliance data management can lead to penalty fees and further consequences from regulatory agencies. Data governance consistently monitors your data management and ensures your data management follows all regulations, from entry to storage.
How to implement data governance best practices
The most important part of data governance is creating a clear strategy. Without a well-laid-out strategy, your team will lack direction. A focused strategy provides organizations with an understanding of what success looks like and a proper roadmap of how to attain it. In order to create a detailed data governance strategy with a holistic approach, you must consider the people, processes and technologies.
Establish a strong team
The first step in implementing a data governance program is to build a team and define who in your organization will be responsible for governing and maintaining your data. These data managers will be accountable for the quality of the data and the support of data quality activities and initiatives company-wide.
The data team must ensure that the data governance initiatives are aligned with business needs and that the data meets their requirements. Data governance sounds like something that should be aligned with the IT portion of your organization, but data requires a specially focused department.
Once a team is formed to manage data quality, everyone in the business should have access to data. Data should be readily available for all members of the business to ensure stakeholders can easily access the information they need to make data-driven business decisions. Without this critical communication, your organization will end up with a big data strategy as opposed to a data governance strategy.
Develop clear data processes
After clear roles are established and everyone is able to understand how to use data, your organization needs to develop clear and thoughtful data processes. These processes include definitions of how data will be stored, moved, changed, accessed and secured. Data-driven organizations must also put control, audit, and monitoring processes in place. Monitoring processes ensure that data remains reliable and usable, and they are especially crucial for compliance in highly regulated industries.
The processes put into place should follow a format that fits your organization’s goals and structure. Focusing your data governance processes on the business and its needs is very important to a successful and sustainable data management strategy.
Incorporate the right tools
Data governance cannot be completed with technology alone, but organizations should leverage solutions, tools, and integrations that will help build and reinforce strong governance initiatives. Examples of effective solutions include technology that will help enforce business rules, monitoring and reporting software, and data quality tools.
Data governance tools
Data governance is a holistic process, and there is a combination of tools that can help you increase the effectiveness of this process. Using data quality tools helps to free up valuable time in your day-to-day organizational functions by improving the quality and usability of your data.
- Incorporating data governance tools into your current data management strategy can help you:
- Prevent inaccurate data from entering your database
- Remove duplicate information
- Correct errors
- Store and maintain data
- Cleanse email lists
- Continuously update your database with correct information
Experian offers several tools that can provide all the above services and more. From our email verification tools to our real-time address verification tools, we take the hassle out of managing your data and give you more room to expand the potential of your organization’s data management strategy.
Implement your data governance strategy with ease
Data governance is an important and necessary part of any organization’s data management strategy. By taking the right steps to govern your data, you can ensure that you maintain reliable data, make well-informed decisions and stay in compliance with industry regulations.
Experian’s set of data governance tools streamlines your data management processes so that you can focus on using your data properly. With tools managing the tedious work, your team can use their time to make targeted decisions, adjust current strategies based on data, and build upon the organization’s success.
Contact Experian today to learn more about the following:
