The role of Data Governance in Data Management

Whether you are just starting out in building your business journey or have been doing it for a while now, chances are, data management terms have become a tangled mess for you. We at AINSYS asked our developers to clear everything up.

Contents

1 There is no data management without proper data governance

2 Examples of what can go wrong without Data Governance

Turns out that DAMA International, a global not-for-profit organization which aims to advance concepts and practices about information management and data management, has developed the DMBOK pyramid to break down data management into specific data knowledge areas, called subject areas.

As you can see, data governance is the foundation of data management. This is because data governance provides direction and oversight for data management to ensure the secure and effective use of data within organizations.

There is no data management without proper data governance

Why is that? Well, that is because a comprehensive data governance framework provides

• stringent rules (for example, how long we keep the data, where we store it, etc.);
• processes (how that access is provided, how we ensure that our data is up to date and secure, etc.);
• accountability (who is responsible for what data in the company) that allows a company to better manage its data sources, including the availability, usability, security, and integrity aspects of it.

Think of it as bringing an organization’s data under control and keeping it secure and consistent.

Data Governance is one of the most important things in your company. There are quite a few reasons why data governance rules, processes, and accountability should stay on your mind:

• You need to keep your data secure within departments, cross-departments, and externally. For example, If you are, for example, working in an HR department, what data governance should achieve for you is that only employees that actually need this HR data and have the necessary permission levels to access the data will be able to access it. No one else should be able to access this data within the company;
• You need to ensure that you comply with the different regulations in the different countries and the data privacy laws. This is often overlooked because not many people know what kind of fines and penalties are out there;
• If you implement data governance, you’re actually going to improve the data quality. This way, you’re going to have different processes and procedures in place, making sure that your systems, your people and your processes are implemented in such a way that the data quality is not compromised;
• To avoid inconsistent data silos that is a daily nightmare that happens to every single company out there, improve trust in the data, and achieve better decision making;
• To improve efficiency.

Data governance has become such a hot topic over the last few years: the more we move towards data driven companies, the more we depend on our data, the more data we generate, and it becomes much more complex to manage all this data. This all sounds nice and grand but people still somehow manage to ignore data governance. We want you to know what will happen if you ignore data governance.

Examples of what can go wrong without Data Governance

We’ve all heard about the GDPR, for example, which stands for General Data Protection Regulations. This is something that was introduced in May of 2018, and every single company that operates in any form within the European Union needs to abide by these rules. Now, we’ve all heard about it, the potential fines, but we don’t think many people actually understand how often this actually happens. For example, Amazon was fined almost $1 billion, WhatsApp was just recently fined $267 million for insufficient fulfillment of data subject rights. These are just a couple of examples. GDPR has been around for less than 5 minutes but according to the GDPR enforcement tracker, more than 1000 companies have been fined already.

The fines are not the only disaster that you’re going to have to face if you don’t have a proper data governance. For example, if your data is not secure enough, nothing is going to stop someone from getting your data and selling it to a competitor.

Wrong data can be even more hurtful –  with bad quality means wrong decisions. But your data should be one of the biggest assets of your company. And this is why it’s so important to make sure that you implement data governance correctly. You don’t want to be one of the companies on the GDPR enforcement tracker.

To tackle organizing proper data governance, you need the right data management tools that will offer the following features:

• Intuitive no-code GUI for business users and technical teams;
• AI-assisted requirement management for rapid implementation;
• Pre-built industry-specific templates for seamless integration;
• Customizable, modular architecture for tailored solutions;
• On-premise or cloud-based deployment options for flexibility and security.

AINSYS offers these and other tools and syncs data between every tool and platform your IT team employs, helping you get an accurate picture of your software. By implementing AINSYS tools, any business can organize proper data governance to make the right decisions for your organization and keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape.