Business Intelligence and Data Governance: Why They Matter for Your Business

Data governance is the process of defining, implementing and monitoring the policies, standards and practices that ensure the quality, security and usability of your data. Data governance helps you to achieve your business objectives and overcome your business challenges by enabling you to improve your decision-making, reduce risks and so much more. When you combine business intelligence and data governance, you’ll notice enhanced consistency, accuracy and data traceability. 

Overcome Challenges 

Ensuring accurate data isn’t without its challenges. When you combine business intelligence and data governance, you can:

• Improve decision-making: Ensure that you have accurate, complete and consistent data that you can trust. You can use business intelligence for strategic, operational and analytical purposes. Data governance also helps you to avoid data silos and to integrate data from multiple sources and systems.
• Reduce risks and costs: Comply with the legal, regulatory and ethical requirements that apply to your data. Business intelligence and data governance also help you to prevent data breaches, data loss and data corruption that can damage your reputation, customer trust and bottom line.
• Increase efficiency and innovation: Optimize your data processes and workflows, and eliminate data duplication and redundancy. Data governance also helps you to leverage data assets to create new value from your data. 

Implementing Data Governance 

To implement data governance effectively, organizations must align their data governance strategy with their business strategy and prioritize their data governance initiatives or projects. In implementing a business intelligence and data governance program, it’s imperative that organizations involve business stakeholders and data users. 

These stakeholders and users will be invaluable in helping you define and execute the plan. Finally, successful data governance initiatives start and end with communicating the benefits and value of data governance to the organization.

How to Understand Your Data Landscape

A data landscape is the collection of data sources and data types that your organization uses and produces. Your data landscape can include structured, semi-structured or unstructured data, such as:

• Transactional data, which records your business transactions and activities, such as sales, orders, invoices, payments, etc.
• Operational data, which monitors and supports your business operations, such as inventory, logistics, customer service, etc.
• Analytical data, which provides insights and intelligence for your business, such as reports, dashboards, metrics, KPIs, etc.
• Master data, which defines and describes your core business entities, such as customers, products, suppliers, etc.
• Metadata, which describes the characteristics and context of your data, such as definitions, schemas, lineage, sensitivity, etc.

Understanding your data landscape is essential for data governance, as it helps you to identify your data assets and your data dependencies. Data assets are the data sources and types that have high value and impact for your business. These assets need to be managed and governed effectively. 

Data dependencies are the data sources and types that have high interdependency and complexity, and that need to be integrated and aligned consistently.

To understand your data landscape, conduct a data inventory and a data assessment. This is the process of identifying and documenting your data sources and types, and their locations, owners, formats, quality, security and usability.  

How to Empower Your Data Stakeholders

Empowering your data stakeholders is a key objective of business intelligence and data governance, as it helps you to create a data-driven culture and foster a data-savvy workforce in your organization. This also helps you improve collaboration and communication among stakeholders and increase their engagement and satisfaction.

To enable and support team members in performing their data roles and responsibilities effectively and efficiently, you can:

• Provide data education and training: Equip your data stakeholders with the data knowledge and skills they need to understand and use your data and keep them updated and informed about it.
• Provide data tools and resources: Provide your data stakeholders with the data tools and resources they need to access and use your data, and to make them easy and convenient to use and share.
• Provide data feedback and recognition: Provide your data stakeholders with the data feedback and recognition they need to measure and improve their data performance, and to acknowledge and appreciate their data contributions. 

Find a Partner in Business Intelligence and Data Governance 

You don’t need to create the perfect business intelligence and data governance policy all on your own. We have a team of renowned experts that are here to help your team. To get started with us, book a meeting today.