Have you ever been put on hold by a customer service agent after giving them personal information, only to then be transferred to another agent who asks the same exact questions?
This is a prime example of poorly managed data. While this can be very frustrating for the customer, it’s also an inefficient way to share data and permissions within a company securely.
Unfortunately, poorly managed data can lead to breaches of security and regulations.
A good data governance program or practice will involve a mix of people, processes, and software to ensure suitable security measures are in place and that data is managed correctly moving forward.
Over the past twenty years, Atiba has worked with several clients to help them apply security best practices to meet data governance and privacy regulations. By using industry frameworks such as CIS Controls and Safeguards, Atiba has helped them target regulatory compliance and ensure their data is securely managed.
In this article, we’ll define what data governance is and how adopting a data governance program can positively impact your company. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of why implementing a data governance program is essential and how it can have a direct business impact.
What is Data Governance?
You can think of data governance as a set of guidelines to help safely collect and manage data consistently. These guidelines typically pertain to access, privacy, security, and quality.
To ensure that your company acts in the best interest of its employees and its customers, you can implement a data governance program or practice to provide a privacy framework for everyone in your company to abide by.
4 Benefits of Implementing a Data Governance Program
Here are four key benefits your company will realize by crafting and executing a robust data governance program:
- Complies with data protection laws & privacy regulations
By implementing a data governance program, your business can track and monitor data while ensuring that data remains compliant with industry standards moving forward.
A minor violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulations can cost a large sum of money.
According to VP Analyst at Gartner, Nader Henein, “By year-end 2024, Gartner predicts that 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.”
Putting a robust data governance practice in place will ensure automated compliance with such regulations and laws. Additionally, it will help create a seamless framework for the structured creation, storage, and deletion of data.
- Improves data quality & accuracy
High-quality data is imperative to making accurate and well-informed decisions. A single inaccurate data point can be detrimental across an entire company system.
To improve the quality and integrity of the data your company collects; a data governance program can help to provide consistently and trusted data that business users can rely upon for decision-making purposes.
A data governance program aims to control information as it’s collected and when it’s stored to maintain accurate and high-quality data. This makes it possible to distribute high-quality data efficiently to different company departments.
There are six data quality dimensions to measure data quality:
- Accuracy
- Completeness
- Consistency
- Validity
- Uniqueness
- Timeliness
These metrics can help to properly evaluate the quality of a particular dataset at any point in time.
With the right data governance practice, your company can ensure that all data is consistent, trustworthy, and free from misuse within every department.
- Provides operational efficiency
Developing a process to capture data accurately and securely is valuable incredibly valuable.
Having a data governance process in place will ensure that your process for collecting, managing, and storing data operates smoothly with limited downtime.
In addition, by assigning permissions to specific team members, it is far easier to determine who is responsible for certain data.
Your company’s data governance program can define who and who doesn’t have access to key data points which will help inform data collection moving forward.
- Improves financial performance
Data governance can help your company make better, more informed decisions.
Your company is less likely to make costly errors due to spending less time managing risks due to the data governance program you have in place. Any good data governance process will enable a company to know whether the data they are accessing is present or historical data and if it will be reliable for analysis.
The benefits mentioned above all equate to a return on investment your company will experience in the future.
What’s the Bottom line?
If implemented well, the benefits of data governance are endless.
In order for your company to capitalize on new opportunities, it’s critical to ensure you’re providing the correct data at the correct time to the correct people.
For more information on how to implement a data governance program for your business contact Atiba.