Data governance has become an indispensable exercise in a context where the amount of data multiplies while specific legislation for data protection emerges.
However, ensuring compliance with laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is not the only significant reason to apply efficient data management. According to the 'State of Data Governance and Empowerment' report, the reasons companies initiate data governance are enhanced security (48%), data quality (45%), analytics (35%), regulatory compliance (34%), and improved decision-making (27%).
From this perspective, what are the main benefits for an organization that implements data governance? Let's analyze.
Data governance can be defined as the set of practices an organization implements to effectively manage its data to ensure quality, integrity, and security.
To achieve this, a series of policies, standards, and procedures are established to regulate effective data management, including:
Data governance contributes to the standardization and consistency of data, ensuring that a company's data is accessible and defining responsibilities around it. This facilitates all types of processes and solves problems like those that may arise during data segmentation.
The decision-making process is optimized because data governance makes data more easily discovered and used. Thus, correct and relevant data becomes accessible for decision-making, which can foster innovation in decision-making.
Data governance processes put into practice the idea that a company's data is a valuable asset. Thus, as with other assets (for example, machinery in a manufacturing company), data management initiates inspection, maintenance, and updating processes to ensure its integrity and value.
This directly aligns with greater transparency and understanding of data lineage. Thus, data governance provides a comprehensive view of data assets, knowing what data is available, where it is stored, and who is responsible.
Increased revenue and improved overall organization results are the outcomes of all the above advantages. Thanks to data governance, companies make better decisions to optimize their results, becoming more efficient and productive organizations.
At the same time, they are protected from potential risks and costly errors linked to incorrect data management. Thus, data governance can be key to initiating processes like investments in automation through test data.
Data governance provides guarantees in compliance with legislation related to data privacy and security, such as the General Data Protection Regulation or ARCO rights.
By applying proper data governance processes, companies lay the foundation for reducing costs associated with infrastructure and data security.
This is because a fundamental part of data governance is data classification, categorizing data according to its sensitivity and value. Thus, organizations can focus their security resources on the most critical data, allocating resources more efficiently and reducing costs associated with protecting less critical data.
In turn, thanks to data lifecycle management, the elimination of obsolete data is sought. This reduces storage costs and decreases the attack surface for potential security threats.
A company that successfully implements data governance demonstrates a commitment to its data integrity and its customers' privacy. In other words, it sets up effective barriers against significant reputation losses linked to GDPR non-compliance or security failures. Moreover, it lays the groundwork for delivering value more quickly both internally and to its customers.
When implementing data governance in an organization, it is essential to adopt a comprehensive approach based on specific knowledge in this area.
In this sense, although many organizations begin to worry about data management only to comply with legislation, it is crucial to go a step further than "simple" compliance.
Accessing all the advantages we have just described involves applying data governance capable of having a real impact on the organization.
In turn, the deployment of appropriate digital tools and software will play a crucial role in accessing the benefits of data governance. At icaria Technology, we help organizations implement their data governance processes effectively, attending to the needs of each project. Contact us and learn about our Data Governance software.
