Data Governance Prevents Data Assets from becoming Data Liabilities

Data governance is the formal orchestration of people and processes that allows an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset. Raw data is of no value but can become a vital asset for the organization if it is refined and understood. The data can then be used to generate critical insights, resulting in improved business decisions across an enterprise to increase revenue, reduce risk and drive competitive advantage. To allow this transformation regardless of the data environment, data governance mechanism is adopted. Big data environments are particularly susceptible to general issues around data quality and data lineage, given the predominance of unstructured and semi-structured data. In short, data governance provides enterprises with the skill and structure they need to turn raw data into real intelligence. Besides, data governance also ensure that data is consistent and trustworthy, which is crucial for organizations because they rely on data to make business decisions, optimize operations, create new products and services and improve profitability.

Though a multi-faceted concept, data governance provides the tool and processes to foster data understanding throughout an enterprise. It is a comprehensive program including a core set of solutions to offer a proper governance foundation. The solutions include a business glossary, data dictionaries as well as data lineage to define data, terms and business attributes along with data sources, usage, relationships, and interdependence. Data governance also assign accountability and ownership among data stakeholders and owners as well as derive process for managing inquiries and resolving issues. Earlier data governance was closely associated with ensuring regulatory compliance but today the role of data governance is far broader in this big data age. Like metadata management is a vital part of governance and metadata plays a significant role for organizations to discover analytic insights. Data governance plays a critical part in maintaining data quality, as organizations struggle to assess, improve and report their data quality.

Today, data governance helps organizations overcome challenges like data accessibility, usability, meaning, and quality, all growing exponentially in the world of big data. Big data is usually considered as treasure-troves for insights but without proper data governance, accountability, and organizational collaboration and support, big data proves to be black holes of unused data. Data quality is of much concern when data is considered for analysis because data should be accurate, consistent and reliable so that enterprises can depend upon it to generate accurate analysis and insights. Accessibility and understanding of data is essential for business users as without them it is like having a warehouse full of equipment but no instructions to use them. Similarly, business users need to know what data is available, how it is used internally, how is it defined and what are the related business terms. Data must be available to users and should be organized, categorized and well defined clearly, so that right data is selected for the right task.

Summary - Data governance is gaining prominence due to the increasing volume of data and the emergence of big data environments and due to challenges of securing data quality to generate quality outcomes. A comprehensive data governance program provides a solid framework so that the organizational data is reliable, understandable and usable.

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