Blogs

There is a growing trend in companies today to collect data and in most cases to collect big data sets. Analytics and data visualization are then applied to these big data sets to gain business insight, perform forecasting and to make business decisions with. However, there is a speed bump in the road preventing wider access of this data being accessed by all of the right people at the right time – this roadblock is called “Data Governance.”

Data Governance is enforced in this new day and age mostly due to financial and legal policies, regulatory needs, confidentiality laws, and other forms of safety measures to protect businesses, employees, consumers and governments. So the question becomes “How do we provide employees with timely access to data that allows them to efficiently and effectively perform their job in this new era of data and analytics?”

With respect to financial data, many publicly traded companies take the avenue of placing employees inside a trading window or companies require the signing of more robust employee agreements based on data privileges. While this works to some extent, this solution may not be scalable as more and more employees need access to financial data.

There are many strategies and tactics that companies are investing and deploying to solve the issue of data governance, let’s have a look at a few of these ideas.

• Investment in sophisticated data management systems which allow access to data using a combination of permissions and privileges, segmentation of data and time-based releases of data (i.e., access to financial data in a publicly traded company after the data has been publicly disclosed).
• Providing the right tools and technology infrastructure – the emergence of tools such as Hadoop, Tableau, MicroStrategy, etc. that allow storage, retrieval, analysis and visualization of data.
• Teaching employees how to use data analysis tools so they can perform their own analysis of data sets and how to interpret data including patterns, trends, statistical analysis, etc.
• Radically re-think what data governance is inside a company in terms of who has access to what data and when. Company policies and employment agreements are starting to address a more open environment for data access.

Companies are rapidly moving to collecting more data, performing more analysis and providing more employees access to data. We are in the midst of a data revolution that in some companies is just reaching the tipping point in terms of providing the right data to employees.

The data revolution has started – so join up and ask your company for access to the data that will enable you to drive business efficiencies and effectiveness!