Data Governance Professional Services

Data Governance Consultancy Service

A Strategic, Ongoing and Collaborative Practice

Organizations are preparing for their data oriented futures. They are making more data available to more people with the hope of gaining more insights. They are turning to technology that provides guardrails and self-service to ensure experts and generalists alike have the time they need to confidently leverage data the right way, building trust while reducing risk. But with limited data visibility and a lack of lineage and data history, challenges remain that prevent effective data access, analysis, and use to help the business.

Defining Modern Data Governance

As organizations look to promote data access and mitigate risk while ensuring compliance, they continue to focus on data governance. Data governance is a strategic, ongoing and collaborative practice that enables organizations to discover and track their data, understand what it means within a business context, and maximize its security, quality and value. While digital transformation and other data-driven initiatives are desired outcomes, few organizations know what data they have or where it is, and they struggle to integrate known data in various formats and numerous systems – especially if they don’t have a way to automate those processes. But when IT-driven data management and business-oriented data governance work together in terms of both personnel, processes and technology, decisions can be made and their impacts determined based on a full inventory of reliable information.

According to Dataversity data governance is “the practices and processes which help to ensure the formal management of data assets within an organization.” Until recently, data governance was primarily an IT role that involved cataloging data elements to support search and discovery. But in this digital age, as the strategic layer connecting data and business architectures, data governance is everyone’s business. To become intelligent enterprises, organizations have to use data to make decisions. The right data of the right quality, regardless of where it is stored or what format it is stored in, must be available for use only by the right people for the right purpose. Making this imperative a reality requires an ongoing strategic effort, enterprise collaboration and enabling technology that provides a holistic view of the data landscape, including where it lives, who and what systems use it, and how to access and manage it.

Hence in the data-driven business era, organizations should consider a Data Governance 2.0 strategy. This approach transforms data governance into an organization-wide initiative that breaks the silos confined within borders of IT. This collaborative take on data governance intrinsically involves data’s biggest beneficiaries and users in the governance process, so historically important functions like data cataloging also benefit from greater context, accuracy and consistency.

Overcome Barriers With Our Expertise

Data Governance Consultancy Service is about supporting you implementing and/or enhancing your data governance initiative, including discovery of critical enterprise data within a business context, tracking its physical existence and lineage, business glossary development, maximizing security, quality and value of data and flourishing data-intelligence with metadata management and impact analysis efforts.

Good data governance helps to ensure that those who need to use data can find it, understand it and trust it, which fuels data-driven decision-making across your organization. For this to happen it is vital to

Establish standards, policies, and procedures for the usage, development, and management of data
Design the right organizational structure
Implement the technology infrastructure to support data governance

Yet, the successful adoption of data governance remains a problem for most companies. In order for data governance investments to produce business value, business people have to actually enter, update and use the data definitions, business rules etc. The governance process needs to be a complete feedback loop in which data is defined, monitored, acted upon, and changed when appropriate. Evidence shows that companies that have been successful in scaling data governance spent more than half of their analytics budgets on activities that drive adoption. An initial investment is indispensable that can effectively be delivered only if people are accountable to contribute and if people feel true sponsorship from top management.

Deciding on the operating model is part of the initial steps in setting up and establishing a successful data governance program. The operating model can vary based on your company’s priorities, culture, organizational structure and even internal politics! But instead of trying to build everything at once, it is important focus on quickly demonstrating the value of data governance through a few carefully selected use cases that are tied to a significant business challenge. Similarly it is essential to develop success metrics to establish a baseline to know what bad data means, and potentially, what good data could mean.

Data governance is a new concept for most people which may scare or bring additional responsibilities. When building the data culture, it is crucial to design an easy (as effortless as possible), engaging and user-centric approach. Responsibilities such as data ownership need to be clear, communicated, assigned and managed. Guiding principles should be kept as intuitive and as simple as possible. Exceptions can be managed case by case later on.

Our consultancy and advisory services provide necessary guidance at every stage of the complete data governance implementation life cycle. These cover discovery methods, scoping, modeling and analysis, model assessment, framework support, tool support, organizational support, assessment of outputs and communication channels, guidance, evaluation and reporting, transition planning and transformational execution.

Benefits of Data Governance Consultancy Service

Data governance explains an organization’s philosophy on information collection, use and management. This is a big job that literally grows every day, given the amount of data in the expanding digital universe.

Regulatory Compliance

Respond to audits and demonstrate compliance with data regulations through proper reporting and documentation, including lineage.

Revenue Growth

Uncover ways to reduce expenses, create new revenue streams and even monetize your data.

Accurate Analytics

Be able to take advantage of data analytics tools and ensure the validity of those dashboards because the underlying data is accurate.

Data Quality

Reduce errors and/or find and remediate them quickly to ensure data users can trust the information on which their analyses are based.

Innovation

Develop new products and services or improve existing ones, as well as modernize business, technology and data infrastructures.

Operational Efficiency

Streamline day-to-day operations by implementing improvements, eliminating redundancies and providing optimal employee training and communications.

Privacy and Security

Strengthen data privacy and security procedures and adherence to those standards, as well as identify and tag sensitive data elements.

Data Literacy

Ensure consistent data standards and definitions so enterprise stakeholders are data literate, fluent in how your organization defines and talks about it.

Improved Decision Making

Provide controlled access and visibility to a single version of data truth, making it easy to quickly assess information and decide how to act on it.

Customer Satisfaction and Trust

Deliver efficient, personalized and relevant customer experiences that establish trust and build loyalty.

Related Offerings

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