Data governance: The blueprint for business intelligence

Employees waste at least 2 hours a day searching for information needed to do their job. This adds up to approximately 26 days each year of wasted time. Wouldn’t it be nice to have standards in your business to more easily manage and access data so you’re not wasting so much time and money?

Organizations that rely on data governance—the process of developing internal data standards and policies that govern who can access the data and ensuring it is secure, accurate and usable—have such standards in place.

Data governance helps ensure that your data is accurate, consistent and easily available to the right users. Organizations that do not have a data governance plan are falling behind, as 85% of data professionals and executives are making incorrect decisions and losing revenue due to stale data and information, according to a 2022 industry survey.¹

The faces of data governance: fines, breaches, volume

Data governance has been around for roughly 40 years and has evolved with the changing business landscape. However, what has brought it into the spotlight are concerns for how to manage an increasing amount of data volume, data breaches and regulatory compliance laws.

Data breaches have caused countries to introduce regulations to protect sensitive information. As a result, organizations need policies to follow these regulations and ensure compliance. Lack of compliance can lead to fines, in addition to harming brand reputation and future business growth.

Huge penalties for non-compliance, or violating data protection laws, are often the first thing that people associate with data governance because they generate headlines. Since 2019, the biggest fines for data breaches or non-compliance with security and privacy laws amount to $4.4 billion, which includes major issuers.²

Data governance programs are commonly born after something negative happens—including regulatory, audit, compliance and privacy concerns.

To stay in data compliance and take control of your information, you need a model for internal data standards and policies that govern who can access data and how it’s used.

What’s the blueprint for your data governance model?

Gartner predicts that through 2025, 80% of organizations that seek to grow digital businesses will fail because of a misguided data governance strategy.³

A sound data governance model ensures there is a process to follow throughout the data life cycle that includes the actions people must take, the processes to follow and the technology that supports them. These standards include how data is gathered, stored, processed and disposed.

Think of data governance like a blueprint for how to manage your organization's data. This is not to be confused with data management, which is the building or constructing of that plan into a working structure, rather than the approach.

Why is this important? A data governance plan reduces the risk of errors and ensures timely, accurate data is available for decision making. This allows companies to act on opportunities and mitigate risks, which is a huge cost factor.

An improperly built governance plan means you wasted resources building it, and then must figure out what is wrong before starting again. It’s like building furniture from IKEA. Without following the blueprint, it’s bound to collapse.

The same goes for an organization building a data governance framework. A blueprint helps decide the best approach, delivers business intelligence to key stakeholders and determines which stakeholders are crucial to the planning process.

Unfortunately, most organizations are unsure where to start.

Companies have different organizational structures around data governance, but one of the more common approaches is having an enterprise data governance team that is responsible for the strategy, success criteria, frameworks, etc. They educate and train the stakeholders in each business unit on the program, and the business units are then positioned to implement.

Key first steps are understanding your organizational structure, the data landscape and potential risk areas as well as engaging your data science team, business users and stakeholders.

The people side of governance

The right team ensures your data policies are defined, procedures are sound, technologies are properly managed, and data is protected. This is important because business leaders rely on timely and valuable insights from that data to make informed decisions.

Many people think an organization’s IT team is the sole contributor to a data governance program. They are part of the equation but there are other key players.

Other common roles include a data owner / admin, data steward, data custodian, and data users / business subject matter experts. The data owner / admin oversees implementation and handles high-level concerns. The data steward catalogs assets and ensures users can access data, while a data custodian handles security, storage and use of data. Every organization has users, who must be trained on policies and standards.

It’s important to understand your business infrastructure and processes to see how data flows between these roles. Also, since data governance is a continuously fluid practice, your plan and team can change based on your needs.

One part that should remain constant is stakeholder buy-in and support. This is crucial to drive business value and deliver the data to business units.

Start small, think big

Data governance can be overwhelming. There is a lot to know and do, including building your data model to best match their business structure and engaging business unit stakeholders to take action. What’s the right starting approach?

Kenneth Viciana advises organizations to start small, think big: “Data governance programs are not successful overnight, and often fail when organizations try to boil the ocean.”

In other words, don't take on too much at once or make your scope so large that it becomes nearly impossible to achieve your goals. Create a plan with achievable milestones that display business value. Small wins are key to garner business support in data governance. This support is necessary to establish a successful data governance program.

Once all business units are on board and data governance has been successfully implemented, your company can harness the power of actionable data to reap major benefits including more efficiency and easier access to data. In the end, your business not only saves resources but has a big opportunity to make key decisions quicker on opportunities from its data.

¹Fivetran Global Survey of ERP Data Professionals and Executives 2022
²CSO “The 12 biggest data breach fines, penalties, and settlements so far”
³Gartner “Choose Adaptive Data Over One-Size-Fits-All for Greater Flexibility”