Why Is Data Governance Important?

We are in the big data era, where companies strongly believe that their data is a valuable asset. For most businesses, the creation of data-driven use cases is slow and the time-to-market is way too big. Why is that? Because data scientists, instead of spending their time creating value-driven data models, are spending their time getting quality data.

Most of the time the data is:

• Unfindable
• Wrongly managed or indexed
• Transformed by hundreds of existing processes
• Copied in different locations and at different aggregation levels
• Not trusted due to lack of quality

On top of the issues above come the GDPR rules. They are rarely fully acknowledged and respected.

^{What is data governance?}
Data governance aims to provide the guidance and support needed to fully exploit the value of data and help each organization to ensure optimized data management and become data-driven.

A data governance framework establishes principles and practices that frame the collection and usage of the data of an organization to ensure a high-quality level of the data during its entire life cycle. It encompasses the people, processes, rules, organizational structures, and technology required to ensure that the correct data is informing high-value business functions.

Ignoring the data governance can lead to inconsistencies in different systems across the business. It also creates complications with data misuse, integration errors, security vulnerabilities, regulatory compliance.

Regardless of how the need for governance surfaces, the purpose should always include a clear value proposition and be in line with the “Triple Aim of Data Governance”:

1. Improve data quality : more reliable, recent and complete data
2. Improve data literacy: better capacity of identification, collection, treatment and interpretation of data
3. Improve data use: more data driven decision-making

^{Advantages and benefits of data governance}
Data governance helps break down the data silos that are created when different teams, agencies, and geographies are not centrally coordinated. A strong data governance framework has several advantages in an organization:

• Better data quality
• Easier data accessibility, usage and manipulation
• Higher security for your data

These three points lead to five main benefits for the entire organization:

• Increasing the operational effectiveness: with data that is more accessible and of better quality, processes can be optimized and mistakes are reduced.
• Making data-driven decisions: with accessible and reliable data, you no longer need to make decisions based on hunches and guesses: you can base them on facts.
• Complying with regulations: a full view on your data, their type, their location, and their usage strongly favours the respect of international rules.
• Reducing time-to-market for data science use cases: companies that have defined roles, responsibilities, and processes of data governance can make the time-to-market of a data science use case twice as fast.
• Reduce the risk of data misuse: the entire organization will become more aware of what data is and why it is a strategic asset. Anyone will be able to understand and use data safely, thereby taking full advantage of their data.

^{Data governance and Euranova}
Data governance is one of the expertise pillars of Euranova. We developed our data governance practice based on the state of the art in data governance combined with our extended experience and knowledge of the customer’s reality.

The approach is focused on making a simple framework keeping only the essentials and keeping it flexible to be able to adapt it to each customer’s reality. The goal is to maximize the adoption rate of the entire company.

Our practice brings theoretical concepts to concrete and tangible actions. We define a strategy with our customers and then help along the way to implement its components. We make sure to include in the strategy not only data management aspects but also organizational elements such as communication, training, and culture, as well as the operating systems and their deployment. We offer an agile end-to-end approach that will support your digital transformation through awareness, diligence, and organization.

Our White Paper

You can also read our white paper that walks you through Euranova’s agile end-to-end data governance approach that will ensure better data quality, easier data accessibility and higher security for your data.