Everything You Need to Know About Data Governance

Data governance is important in business. It allows businesses to define roles and responsibilities for data management, establish best practices, and use their data to the best of their advantage. 

However, the field of data governance is a complicated one, and so, this article will delve into what you need to know about data governance, and how to use your data management to make your business thrive.

What is Data Governance?

Data Governance refers to the set of policies, procedures, and controls that an organisation puts in place to manage its data assets. Data Governance involves defining roles and responsibilities for data management, ensuring data quality, privacy, and security, and establishing standards and best practices for data use and sharing.

It is also used to set internal standards—data policies—that apply to how data is gathered, stored, processed, and disposed of. It governs who can access what kinds of data and what kinds of data are under governance.

The key components of Data Governance include data quality management, data privacy and security, data architecture, metadata management, data stewardship, and data policy and standards. Each component plays a critical role in ensuring that data is managed effectively and efficiently across the organisation.

Why is Data Governance Important?

Data Governance is critical for organisations of all sizes and types because it ensures that data is accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. It enables organisations to make better-informed decisions, reduce risk, and improve compliance with regulations and industry standards. 

Data Governance also helps organisations to optimise their data assets, streamline data-related processes, and improve collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Implementing A Data Governance Strategy

There are six major steps in implementing a successful data governance strategy. These steps will help your business to manage your data effectively and optimise your processes. These steps are:

• End-to-End Perspective

Successful data governance needs to be implemented from end-to-end, meaning that it encapsulates your entire data landscape from data warehouse to business intelligence solution.

• Include the BI Solution

Even if you have the best-of-breed Data Governance for your Data Warehouse, it doesn't matter - you need to include your visualisation tools in your governance framework as well.

• Leverage Automation

If you are relying on people to perform manual processes in order to achieve a properly governed data landscape, you will never have 100% coverage.

• Think Big. Start Small. Scale Fast.

We believe in a 'Think Big, Start Small and Scale Fast" approach to Data Governance and the power of starting from the business perspective ensuring data quality and trust.

• Test your Solution

We encourage BI users to test their entire solution so that they know that all of their data is correct and is aligned with their overall governance framework.

• Choose the right Partner

Through partnering with Catalyst BI, we have the expertise to ensure you have the best-of-breed governed solutions to enhance your BI environment.

The Best Tools to Use in Data Governance

The tools you use in data governance are important. With the right technology and processes in place, you can trigger immediate action from real-time, up-to-date, and trusted data, accelerating business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain. 

Your data governance tools should enable you to:

• Simplify Compliance Auditing: Quickly verify that data is stored and processed in line with key policies and regulations.
• Validate Data: Verify each source to confirm it’s correctly transformed and placed in the specified location.
• Increase Analytic Insights: Accelerate discovery and insights with self-service access to business-ready data.
• Streamline Analytic Migration: Accelerate migration planning by quickly evaluating the location and lifecycle of data sources.
• Evaluate Data Overlap: Clearly view duplicative data usage across Qlik Sense, Tableau, and Power BI in your business.
• Manage Changes Over Time: Reconcile and optimise your use of old and new datasets.
• Catalogue and Share QVD Files: Easily manage and enable discovery across hundreds or thousands of QVD data files.

Data Governance Consultancy from Catalyst BI

Data governance tools from Catalyst offer a wide range of benefits, including expanding your analytics data pipeline capabilities, providing interactive data lineage, impact analysis, and governance, and enabling "explainable BI" - a higher level of visibility and trust in your data.

With the right technology and processes in place, you can trigger immediate action from real-time, up-to-date, and trusted data, accelerating business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain. 

With data governance tools from Catalyst BI, you can rest assured that your organisation is equipped with the tools and insights needed to make smarter, data-driven decisions that drive growth and success.

Get in touch today to start your journey of becoming a data-driven business so you can drive sustainable growth.