What is Data Governance?

Have you ever heard of data governance? Do you know what it is and how it works? Data governance is a booming topic. Many people are now interested in data governance, Big Data, and everything related to data mining and analytics.

Index

• What is data governance?
• How to adopt a data governance model within your company?
• Benefits of data governance

What is data governance?

Data governance can be defined as the processes and controls for the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data used by an organization. But what does this mean? In simple words, data governance helps us to efficiently manage the information collected by the company or organization in which we work; you can also say that it's the ability of an organization to take care of the quality of data throughout its life cycle, including where it is obtained, how it is obtained, its processing and even how it is distributed and stored.

It is prevalent within companies to collect a large amount of data and information. However, this only works if it is separated and analyzed accurately. Effective data governance helps us and ensures that the data we are going to extract and use is consistent with the objectives of the organization and the purpose for which it is being extracted; it also ensures that the data can be used in the right way to help us optimize business operations and drive business decision making.

How to adopt a data governance model within your company?

1. Manage policies and procedures so that the data collected can follow an order and thus improve the data quality.
   
   
2. Create a data dictionary. This is made to have all the definitions or important and official concepts of the company in one place to have a universal language among employees so that there is no confusion or misinterpretation of the data.
   
   
3. Create dashboards to segment the data compiled so that you can use only those that are needed for the chosen tasks.

Benefits of data governance

1. Trust. If you run an organization that implements data governance, you can be sure that you can trust the data to be used within the company.
   
   
2. You can anticipate future problems within the company because, thanks to the analysis and choice of data, you can detect in time risks within the organization that are hidden or more difficult to see.
   
   
3. You can learn more about your customers' needs since data governance can provide you with more in-depth information about the sector in which you work.

In conclusion, data governance is an essential tool within organizations. Being able to know in depth the data collected, what it is used for, when it is used and who within the organization has access to it, can mark a before and after in your company; it will also give you the necessary confidence that your data is being used ethically and functionally, thus improving the efficiency of the company and the trust of consumers.