Data governance forms the foundation of company-wide data management, which can effectively use reliable data. Effective data management is an important task that needs centralized control mechanism.

What is data governance?

Data governance includes the personnel, processes and technologies needed to manage and protect the company's data assets, so as to ensure that the company's data is generally understandable, correct, complete, credible, secure and discoverable. Data governance mainly includes the following contents:

Why is data governance so important?

The lack of effective data governance within the company guarantees one thing: bad data. This poor data table now doesn't respect inconsistent definitions, duplication, missing fields and other classic data. These are clear problems that should be solved-but what can bring the return on investment to the company that solves these problems?

The following are three main advantages that emphasize the importance of data governance:

1. Data governance saves money.

Simply put, data management improves efficiency. Duplicate accounts may lead to duplicate work, or at least waste time tracking duplicate accounts in marketing, sales, finance or analysis. Data governance can reduce errors in the database, provide a reliable database for your enterprise, and save valuable time, otherwise it will be used to correct existing data. Time saved is money saved.

In addition, data governance forces enterprises to clearly define their core data and the rules for managing core data. The beginning of the data governance project is an excellent opportunity for everyone to define core data on the same page. Doing so will ensure the long-term improvement of operational efficiency.

2. Poor data governance is dangerous.

Lack of effective data governance is a security problem for two reasons: external security risks related to dirty and unstructured data and compliance issues.

Wrong data and data with wrong structure will bring security risks. There is a simple reason. If there is dirty unstructured data in your database, how can you quickly judge when there is a problem and how can you effectively monitor which data is at risk? Good data governance tools and practices can more easily monitor what happens in the whole database, and can more easily see which areas may be at risk.

Compliance and data governance are increasingly becoming hot topics. With the increasing awareness of the importance of personal data, the government began to store, protect and use customer data in a fair way.

Take GDPR as an example. The regulation will come into effect at the beginning of 20 18, enabling EU residents to better control their personal information, including the famous "right to be forgotten", and enabling EU residents to request the deletion of all data in commercial databases. (Please note that this applies to any company that does business with EU residents, so this rule can easily cross the United States). For a chaotic and unmanaged data swamp, there may be no guarantee that all data about a specific individual will be deleted when requested. This puts your company at great risk and may be severely punished.

3. Good data governance provides clarity

Take a moment to imagine what the guarantee of perfect data means to your business. Effective data governance usually makes the data clear, standardized and accurate, so that you can sit back and relax. This influence has an impact on the whole company.

This clarity will bring the following benefits:

Make sure your indicators are accurate-what is your KPI?

Know what your most important indicator is.

Have more confidence in analysis

What will happen in the future?

Data governance is the key to today's data-driven companies, but do today's companies want data-driven? Now that we know why data governance is important at present, let's consider three main forces that companies can benefit from in the near future: Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data.

These three forces have brought great hope to many companies through a large amount of data, through which insight and wisdom can be gained; ? However, the influx of data has increased the demand for effective data governance plans. If the company is not ahead of the dirty data from the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data, then the main result may be just a huge data swamp, rather than the intelligence and profit increase expected by board members.

One of the most important factors of data governance is consistency with all teams and individuals responsible for collecting, managing and using data. Make sure everyone is involved, and there are clear goals, clear processes and clear authority levels to make everything go smoothly. The key to data governance is effective collaboration. The right data governance tools should go hand in hand with these principles. Ensure that any tool you evaluate is easy for business and IT users to use, supports seamless collaboration across teams, and is flexible enough to improve according to your changing business needs.