How to Improve Your Data Governance Strategy

Becoming a “data-driven” organization starts with a good data governance strategy. Data governance involves managing your company’s data assets to make them more available, reliable, secure, and of higher-quality. In turn, you can transform raw data into valuable business insights.

Unfortunately, creating the right data governance strategy for your organization is sometimes easier said than done. By working with the right third-party data governance partner, you can see improvements across the board to metrics such as employee productivity, employee retention, sales pipeline conversion rates, and customer loyalty.

Why Companies Struggle with Data Governance

Doing data governance right is more difficult that it might first appear. The challenges of implementing a data governance strategy include, but aren’t limited to:

Steering Committee politics: An effective data governance strategy requires buy-in from both business and IT. Even once you’ve set up a committee with members from across the organization, those in charge of data governance often treat their obligations as a secondary, peripheral, nonessential responsibility.

Data silos: When teams and departments isolate their data from other parts of the business (either intentionally or unintentionally), data silos are the result. Four out of five companies say that they’ve had issues with data silos, which keep the rest of the organization in the dark and deny users the insights they need to do their jobs effectively.

Case Study: Food and Beverage Chain

Datavail recently worked with a fast food restaurant chain that runs over 1,000 locations in dozens of countries. With so much information on sales and operations to process on a daily basis, the client was struggling to keep up while maintaining the quality of its data. In particular, different areas of the business were butting heads and crossing wires by disagreeing about the right metrics and KPIs to use.

Searching for a better strategy, the client worked with Datavail to create a well-defined plan of execution to put a data governance framework into practice. Datavail helped the client implement clear processes and workflows for its data warehouse and BI and analytics solutions. This gave the entire organization a universal language and set of standards to use when communicating across separate teams and departments.

How Datavail Can Help Develop a Data Governance Strategy

The restaurant chain above is far from alone in working with a technology partner like Datavail. According to a study by Forrester, 65 percent of business leaders are working with third-party partners to help extend their data and analytics capabilities.

Big data is growing bigger and more complex, and most companies aren’t able to keep up on their own. Unless you’re already in the data business, your organization likely has a shortage of the in-house expertise that you need to develop a truly effective data governance strategy.

Working with the right team of experienced, knowledgeable data management professionals will be essential.

Need a solution to your data governance woes? Speak with our team of experts today. Datavail can help you with data governance activities such as:

• Developing best practices and guiding principles for data governance
• Establishing a non-invasive data governance framework
• Implementing master data management
• Implementing a data catalog and/or metadata dictionary
• Developing a strategic implementation roadmap to meet your ‘Data Vision’
• Updating or implementing your Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Executing your Data Lake architecture
• Profiling datasets to ensure high levels of data quality and data reliability
• Building reporting solutions tailor-made for your business needs, using data from across the enterprise