What is Data Governance

Data Governance may not be a buzzing word in the technology landscape, but surely it has been terribly impactful in the data-driven business world.

Data Governance Definition and Explanation:

Data governance is the process of implementing a standard set of rules for managing an organization's valuable asset called ‘data’ in order to make better business decisions. 

Many enterprises view data governance as a ‘nice to have’ solution, rather than a much-needed business function. Companies running successful data governance program within their organization have seen improvements in business processes, effective management of data and information assets. 

Data governance is not a software or hardware it is a set of procedures which ensures important data sets are managed properly throughout the enterprise.  These set of procedures helps to control the data entered manually by operations team or through automated processes. 

Companies can easily gain control over the organizations' data and monitor the methods used by their data stewards and custodians to decrease low data quality. A sturdy data governance program includes a data governor, a set of defined procedures, and a plan to execute the processes.

Reasons to implement data governance 

In general, Finance, HR, and IT are represented as a core part of an organization’s executive team and never exploited the true value of data and information. As a result, the marketing executives are focused on addressing other topics though the business decisions are inter-related to data. So, data governance is an essential strategy to document and implement business rules to have a better control over organizations valuable set of data. 

Companies that adapt data governance policies generate substantial and impressive benefits, including significant costs and saving time, plus successful and matured data-driven decisions. 

Let’s have a glimpse of how data governance matters to companies:

• Reliable data—enabling companies to have reliable and consistent data sets that are proficient enough to assess performance and make better-informed decisions.

• Saving money—is another most important aspect of investing in data governance and helps to generate more ROI.

• Data governance ensures data consistency, reliability and repeatability and data integrity for future changes. The changes may include evolving business challenges, emerging technologies and new data flow.

• Helps to eliminate the least important things from the data sets, gives more clarity and increasing the speed of making the data-related decisions and choices.

• Helps to stay compliant by decreasing the risk of falling under legal and financial reporting ramifications by eliminating poor quality data that leads to bad publicity and penalties.

• Solving analysis and reporting issues are the challenges mostly faced due to lack of data governance. 

• By capturing the key metrics and attributes data governance structures the data responsible for analytical activities of a team.

• Strong governance policies ensure smooth business operations and enabling compliance with consumer information regulations.

• Improved quality results in good quality product and directly impacts on a company’s brand reputation. For example; The companies in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry are more focused on managing product information, maintain high-quality standards, meet customer demands and improve decision making. In this case, data management plays an important role in collecting the information about their products, developing strategies to reach more consumers and meeting market demands.