Data Governance

What is data governance?

Data governance is the process by which an organization manages and secures its data. It includes the procedures and policies governing how data is collected, used, protected, and shared internally and externally. It also helps organizations to ensure that their information is accurate, complete, and consistent.

Data governance is critical to business analytics, which requires accurate, complete, and consistent data. It helps to ensure that businesses have the data they need to make the best decisions; it shapes how and in what contexts that data is used to improve security and outcomes.

How does data governance work?

Data governance is a complex process no matter the environments in which it operates, but one can break it down into three key components:

• Data quality management: ensuring data is accurate, complete, and consistent. This includes processes such as data cleansing and data validation.
• Data security management: ensuring data protection from unauthorized access and use. This includes processes such as data encryption and data access control.
• Data lifecycle management: managing data throughout its lifecycle, from its creation to its disposal. This includes processes such as data archiving and data deletion.

Data governance technologies and techniques also determine who has access to specific data and tools, inside or outside an organization. As Gartner describes, it is “the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure the appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, consumption, and control of data and analytics.”

What are the key benefits of data governance?

Some of the most notable benefits of recent data governance technologies and applications include the following:

• Faster and more efficient data cleansing: Data teams can leverage machine learning to automate the data cleansing process, making it quicker and more efficient.
• Greater data security: Organizations can encrypt data at rest and in motion. In addition, they can implement data access control measures to better protect information from being abused, corrupted, or stolen.
• Data democratization: Data teams can make data accessible to business users at any level of the organization in formats and contexts appropriate to their roles.
• Decision intelligence: Data governance can help organizations in their transition from traditional business intelligence (BI) to modern decision intelligence (DI) environments, helping to maintain security, governance, and accessibility as they support the decisions of any number of business users.

As it evolves, so too do its benefits. New technologies and applications are emerging all the time that can help organizations to improve how they govern, manage, and protect their data.

How are data governance and business analytics related?

Access to data alone is not enough to support meaningful decisions, especially among nontechnical professionals. That’s why data governance technologies are often paired with or even a part of modern business analytics technology platforms.

For example, the Decision Intelligence Platform from Pyramid Analytics includes built-in security and governance tools that scale with an analytics environment. Along with customizable dashboards that can be individualized for various users, Pyramid Analytics supports robust yet simplified data governance capabilities to ensure no risks or limits to how many people data leaders choose to provide data access.

How does data governance with Pyramid Analytics work?

The Pyramid Analytics implementation of data governance is unique in that it can connect any number of users within an organization to the same data sources in controlled, contextually relevant ways. With secured access across all types of users, organizations are less likely to end up with data silos, inconsistent data, old data, or a lack of data awareness. Critically, Pyramid Analytics ensures each user can visualize and appropriately share data in ways that are easy to understand, no matter their level of technical training.

Contact us today to learn more about how our decision intelligence and data governance environment can support better decisions within your organization.