Your data is growing, and as compliance and other regulations evolve, it’s hard to keep up and manage information properly. One effective solution: creating a strong data governance plan. This strategy lets your business efficiently store, use, and share data while complying with industry regulations.
Understanding data governance
The primary goal of data governance is to make sure information is managed correctly. Governance provides structure to data, which bolsters your data’s overall value to your business. Good data governance involves setting up data management rules considering the accessibility, security, and integrity of information that lives in your applications and systems—and having sound strategies to enforce these rules.
Why does data governance matter?
A strong data governance plan enables your team to conduct more effective data analytics and transform your data into actionable insights, promoting company-wide growth. It also provides peace of mind that your data is accurate when conducting operations—and making big decisions.
Here are a few other benefits of data governance:
Improved efficiency
Often, businesses deal with duplicate information that creates inaccuracies and impedes financial, marketing, sales and other activities. Data governance lays out straightforward steps for handling this information, minimizing the time your team spends solving data-related issues. These plans also help users classify and maintain core data, which helps streamline overall operations.
Better regulatory compliance
An effective governance plan can help ensure your business remains compliant with new and existing rules from all regulatory bodies. This strategy safeguards your customers from identity theft and fraud, and it also can guard against potential fines and other risks.
More productive communication
Good data governance creates a common language about information management that all teams can understand. Shared vocabulary helps your employees understand their data responsibilities, simplifying operations and encouraging your users to comply with internal standards. It also ensures users take the same approach when identifying or analyzing data, providing everyone access to reliable information.
More accurate data
If poor data governance can lead to unstructured and untrustworthy information, then good data governance can provide more consistent information. An effective plan allows you to focus on the most relevant metrics for gauging success and honing your analytics, ensuring your data accurately reflects the state of your business.
Preparation for emerging technologies
While data governance is crucial now, it will only grow in importance as innovative technologies impact information. Artificial intelligence, Big Data, and Internet of Things (IoT) may help companies make data-driven decisions, but not without a certain level of risk. A good data governance plan can help your company stay on top of evolving challenges, leading to better business insights and potentially higher revenue.
Implement a data governance plan with Own
Having good data governance standards is central to managing valuable business information. However, establishing this plan is only part of the process. It's also important to select the right partners to help you succeed.
With Own, you can protect your mission-critical data and metadata within Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365—and simplify compliance—with our security, backup and recovery, sandbox seeding, and archiving products.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how we can help.
