Data is, without a doubt, the biggest game-changer to modern businesses and organisations. The landscape is ever-evolving with the latest breakthroughs in technology and emerging digital trends. Business owners must constantly adapt while managing their data’s usability, availability, security, and integrity.
The process of regulating data availability, accessibility, integrity, and security in corporate systems, based on internal data regulations and standards that also manage data consumption, is known as data governance (DG). Effective data governance guarantees consistent, reliable, secure, and not mishandled data. It’s becoming more critical as businesses confront new data privacy requirements and rely on data analytics to help them streamline operations and make better business decisions.
Read on to learn how an effective DG structure can benefit an organisation.
Benefits of data governance:
1. To avoid inconsistent data silos in different departments
Data governance aims to achieve many goals; one is to break down an organisation’s data silos. These silos tend to build up when there is a lack of an enterprise data architecture, resulting in each business unit deploying its own disparate transaction processing systems without centralised coordination. Using a collaborative process, DG seeks to harmonise the data in such systems with the participation of the various stakeholders that represent those individual business units.
2. To increase the accuracy of analytics and give decision-makers reliable info
By implementing uniform policies on data usage and monitoring procedures that help enforce said policies, data governance can ensure that the organisation’s data is used appropriately, eliminates the risk of introducing data errors, and blocks potential misuse of sensitive data, like customers’ personal information. This leads to greater accuracy in data mining and analytics processes and improved data quality. Better data quality benefits organisations by allowing executives access to accurate information that naturally results in better decision-making. This critical competitive advantage makes it easier to net increased revenue and profits.
3. To increase user productivity
When employees are not burdened by tasks that prevent them from doing their jobs, businesses can expect greater user productivity. Without proper data governance, employees will be forced to waste time cleaning up inaccurate information. In contrast, having data stewards that enforce the organisation’s data governance policies means those employees could be more productive since that work gets taken care of well before it reaches their level.
4. To maintain robust data security
Organisations are responsible for protecting all the confidential and sensitive data assets used in their operations, especially personally identifiable information, protected health information, and intellectual property. For instance, organisations can ensure internal data remains within its four walls or is impossible to be copied to a physical drive and establish sufficient backups and recovery processes depending on the sensitivity and value of the data. Moreover, data governance prevents deliberate modification or accidental data loss by enabling businesses to evaluate their current information management strategies and bolster their security posture.
5. To ensure compliance with data privacy laws and other regulations
Another aspect in which data governance helps businesses is in their compliance obligations. Enterprise DG programs generally result in developing standard data formats and definitions applied to all of the organisation’s systems, improving data consistency for business purposes and compliance needs. Poor DG may hamper their regulatory compliance initiatives and cause problems for organisations that must abide by relevant data privacy and protection laws, such as the EU’s GDPR and CCCPA.
Conclusion
As established above, organisations have plenty to gain from focusing on data governance and not letting it be overlooked. Its policies improve the business in more ways than one, but it also helps in crucial administrative tasks such as compliance.
If you’re interested in playing a role in your organisation’s data governance program, consider enrolling in BridgingMinds’ IT security courses in Singapore, specifically the CompTia Data+ course, to learn how to analyse and interpret data, communicate insights, and demonstrate the competency needed to take part in developing the program’s policies or enforcing them. The new class dates for CompTIA Data+ has just been announced, with the earliest one starting on 27th June 2022. Register today to reserve a spot for the upcoming classes!
