Most businesses are behind when it comes to data. Whether you’re focusing on customer data, HR data sets, or logistics, data is an important part of the business. This is because new technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data are providing new opportunities for business leaders. Most of that data is now fully digitized.
Businesses have more data than ever before and they don’t know what to do with it. But now they have the right tools to understand that data in real-time. They have to come up with good management though. Here are six industry secrets for full-proof data governance.
1. House Data on a Single Platform
Good data management is a result of data silos. When you scatter your business data across multiple systems, the ability to manage and work on your data becomes significantly compromised. Good data management starts with breaking down each silo. That involves choosing the right systems that give you complete control over your structured and unstructured data to ensure that you can store that data in order to scale your business.
2. Catalog Your Data Early
Cataloging and data discovery should start as early as possible. It’s the first and most important step of big data management. Your data governance framework should become your main focal point. You want to make it possible for data stewards to create business terms and definitions for business glossaries, and for this data to be tagged as early as possible so you won’t lose that data. Cataloging and governance are at its best when that data is from the data lake at the beginning. You should ensure that your data systems include in-memory computing so your analysis efforts happen at the start.
3. Determine the Difference Between Big Data & Core Data
Data schemas are changing all of the time. This has lead to the development of a new data management paradigm known as late binding. This concept captures raw data and prevents any transformation from happening to the data, at the discretion of the user. This is important for understanding your under-utilized data, but it doesn’t help for core data that are often reused and shared across the entire enterprise.
The next thing is to manage your core and big data so your core data can process as early as possible and the big data is processed afterward. It’s important to have both types of data in its raw form. You’ll never know when you’ll need to create a new schema.
4. Mind Security for Access to Data
Your data also has to be accessible so you can access it. But security should become an important component of your business. Without security, your data owners won’t be able to include their information in your company’s system of record. Data owners can include this information when security policies are enforced.
You should implement a series of data policies for managing and securing your data so the right users can gain access to it. Not only does this protect your data, but it’ll ensure that your data is entering the system in the first place.
5. Focus on High-Quality Data
It’s time to get rid of that low-quality data. Data quality management involves more than providing reliable data, it also increases the trust of your business data, which is ideal for widespread use. If your users don’t have faith in your data, then they won’t use it. A good data management system has both an automated and manual process for cleaning new and old data. Since data can get messy, it’s time to invest resources and time to remove the unnecessary data from your information silos so you can have more accurate insights.
6. Provide AI the Data Management Function
Artificial intelligence (AI) is suitable for data management. One of the biggest secrets of good data is using AI and not managing the data itself. What is data governance? It’s about the availability, integrity, and security of your data.
Instead of using manual processes and outdated tools, AI encourages deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks. This allows you to automatically provision backends, clean up old data, establish new automation routines, and spot any data anomalies.
AI is the key to successful data management. These are the secrets for data governance. Now it’s time to focus on good data management by implementing some of your own practices.
