Data Governance

What is data governance?

Data governance is the process by which an organization manages and secures its data. It includes the processes and policies that govern how data is collected, used, protected, and shared both internally and externally. Proper data governance ensures an organization’s data is accurate, complete, and consistent.

Data governance is a critical part of business analytics, which requires precise, complete, and consistent data. A good data governance strategy helps ensure that a business’s data can be used to make actionable data-driven decisions; it shapes how that data is used to improve security and outcomes.

How does data governance work?

Data governance is a complex process no matter the environment in which it operates, but it can be broken down into three key components:

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

Data governance technologies, techniques, and internal governance policies determine who, inside or outside an organization, has access to certain data and data tools. 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: A data governance team can leverage machine learning to automate the data cleansing process, making it faster and more efficient.
• Greater data security: Organizations can encrypt data at rest and in motion, as well as implement data access control measures, to better protect their data 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 individual 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 data governance evolves, so too do its benefits. New technologies and applications are emerging all the time that can help organizations 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 dynamically scale with an analytics environment. Along with customizable dashboards that can be individualized for any variety of users, Pyramid Analytics supports robust yet simplified data governance capabilities. With Pyramid’s governance framework, there is no limit to the number of people data leaders choose to provide data access to and no risks associated with providing that access.

How does data governance with Pyramid Analytics work?

Pyramid Analytics’ 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.