How to fine-tune guidelines to strengthen your data strategy?

Today, data is among the most critical assets for an organization. Still, for us to fully exploit their potential, there must be policies and guidelines that guarantee the quality, integrity, availability, and reliability of the information.

When we talk about data, policies and guidelines are any actions and protocols we must perform to guarantee that the information and analyses we extract from it are reliable and that we can depend on them with absolute confidence when making business decisions. 

We also find another fundamental aspect within the policies and guidelines: security. Companies implementing data ingestion, storage, and analysis processes must create protocols to ensure they are rigorously compliant with existing regulations. 

Here are some of the benefits of having policies and guidelines in your organization that allow your analytical maturity to reach the next level, but first, it is necessary to define the following:  

What is data governance?

Data programs that reach a certain level of complexity require a dedicated information governance team. This group of professionals usually includes multiple profiles with technical and business knowledge.

Under the leadership of a Chief Data Officer, the data governance team aims, on the one hand, to define the company’s data processing policies and guidelines and, on the other, to do everything in its power to make those policies and guidelines a reality. 

The data governance team must ensure continuous improvement in the quality of the information. This objective involves defining policies and protocols that will determine how the information is collected, stored, and analyzed, who has access to it, and what its uses are.

Here are some benefits of designing a data governance plan with clear policies and guidelines.

Five benefits of strengthening your data governance through policies and guidelines

When the teams in charge of data governance have a clear vision of the business challenges, objectives, and priorities, they can continuously deliver value and transform all areas of a company based on data-based insights.

These are some strategic advantages that can benefit your company when you base your data strategy on clear policies and guidelines that also have professionals dedicated to making them a reality: 

1. Detect and Dissolve Information Silos 

A common obstacle to data strategies is that the information needs to be centralized. When this happens, it is also widespread that the methods to collect, store, and process data are not governed by a single criterion, which significantly limits the impact of the data strategy. 

This is because if we collect data in independent repositories, also known as silos, it is very likely that the organization will have difficulties building a complete vision of the business and taking advantage of the potential of the information at its disposal.

Regardless of the number of channels through which information is collected,  a data governance plan helps you make “speak the same language,” preventing format incompatibilities or redundant work in different areas. 

2. Ensuring Compliance with Regulations

Taking regulation into account is critical to the success of any data strategy. However, the constant evolution of the rules and the small nuances they may have in one territory or another mean that this task requires special attention.

One of the benefits of having a data governance team is that the necessary guidelines are established so the organization can fully trust the information with which it works. 

The preceding implies that the data is collected and used under the strict observance of the rules that govern both the territories where the company operates and the places where the partners and entities with which it interacts are located.

3. Improve the Quality of Your Data

According to Gartner data, poor quality data decreases the value of companies and is responsible for losses that average US$15 million per year. 

Today, many organizations face a significant challenge in obtaining clean information. This is due to the difficulties of having multiple business units, sometimes located in different territories, and constantly interacting with many players. 

Faced with this challenge, having a team in charge of data governance allows companies to care for the quality of the information collected in all channels. 

The quality criteria may vary according to each company’s needs and objectives, but generally consider the information’s accuracy, consistency, reliability, and integrity.

4. Improve Access to Data And Optimize Workflows

When companies establish policies and guidelines for their data strategy, they gain the ability to create valuable insights capable of informing the actions of all areas of the organization. 

This decentralization in the use of data is complemented by the possibility of automating the analysis processes, enabling different work teams to access reliable and accurate data without having to face long waiting times or being dammed by the accumulation of requests from other areas. 

All this process must be carried out without neglecting access protocols so that the data, or sensitive parts, can only be viewed by authorized personnel. Yet, if this criterion is met, improving access to information can speed up processes of each work cell while promoting communication between areas by providing a joint base in terms of analytics.

5. Strengthen Security

As we said before, when data-based insights begin to have a cross-cutting impact across the organization, it is imperative to establish policies and guidelines to know who has access to the information and how it should be used. 

In addition, the data governance team must schedule controls and audits. These actions detect security risks and timely prevent deviations from internal and external guidelines.

Are you seeking a partner to take your data governance to the next level?

At Pragma, we have years of experience working with companies at various levels of analytics maturity, and our teams of data professionals are ready to get down to business.