In today’s data-driven world, organizations are grappling with an exponential growth of data and the challenges associated with managing it effectively. From ensuring data quality and integrity to protecting sensitive information, data governance has emerged as a critical discipline for businesses across various industries. This article explores the importance of data governance and its key components in enabling organizations to harness the power of data while maintaining compliance, privacy, and trust.
What is data governance?
Data governance is a system of processes, strategies, and tools used to make sure data is safe, secure, and used properly throughout its lifecycle. The purpose of data governance is to maintain high-quality data that’s both safely maintained and easily accessible so businesses can gain deeper insights. For example, a business that uses customer data to give product recommendations within its app needs to establish and communicate the processes and procedures for how it uses that data responsibly.
All organizations need data governance. And they need it across all parts of the business — including leadership, procurement, manufacturing, compliance, sales, and marketing. Once businesses have data governance in place, they can apply this system to their data management practices. That way, businesses can make sure they’re analyzing the right data safely and effectively.
Benefits of data governance
Data is a key asset for any business. But the value of that data comes from understanding how to use it properly. Getting data governance right comes with major benefits, including:
- Lower costs: By removing data silos, businesses can eliminate data duplication and spend fewer resources maintaining expensive hardware.
- Standardized data systems: Establishing documented data standards enables teams across an organization to have a shared understanding of its data.
- Regulatory compliance: Data governance tools set guardrails that prevent breaches and misuse of data.
- High-quality data: Complete, clean, and accurate data allows businesses to better understand their workflows and their customers.
- Improved data analytics and decisions: Quality data enables businesses to do more complex data analytics, which leads to stronger insights and more informed decisions.
- Greater transparency and trust: When businesses comply with data regulations, customers will trust that their information is safe.
- Improved monitoring and tracking: Data governance tools can help track data throughout its lifecycle and catch any errors at the source.
- Ability to scale: Data governance practices create pathways for cross-functional teams to efficiently self-serve the data they need — even as those databases grow.
Get started with data governance
In addition to keeping data safe and secure, data governance allows you to spend fewer resources on data that would’ve been left in inaccessible silos. Instead of paying to maintain unknown duplicates, teams across your organization can access data more efficiently. To get started, decide what strategies and processes make sense for your data and choose the right data governance tool to put those processes into practice.
Adobe Experience Platform Data Governance is a first-of-its-kind data governance and management framework that empowers business leaders to classify, manage, and enforce how data is used across their organization — and ultimately build customer trust.
