Ensuring everyone on your team has access to all the data they need helps them to create remarkable digital experiences for your customers—this shouldn’t be difficult to accomplish.
Unfortunately though, it’s extremely common for organizations to view data accessibility as an afterthought. You may believe data management is going to take away your time and resources as you continually gather and store large datasets. If that’s the case, you’re likely looking at your data in the wrong light.
To simplify your data organization and management, you must implement a new approach to data governance. A data governance strategy that allows trusted data to be provided in a timely manner is essential for anyone who wants to lead their organization down the right path.
Continue reading to learn how data governance protects your up-front investment by ensuring all subsequent and historical information is organized and easy to find. Plus, learn the four key principles to a successful strategy that you can use in your new PIM/PLM setup.
Data Governance Defined
Today’s business world is built on a foundation of trusted data. However, mass data collection makes keeping that foundation in place a challenge—that’s why an effective data governance strategy is vital.
The Data Governance Institute (DGI) defines data governance as “a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”
In layman’s terms, data governance is the management of data that ensures the effective and efficient use of information per the requirements, standards, or rules that an organization has set for its individual business goals.
Data governance establishes the processes, people, and responsibilities an organization needs to ensure the quality and security of the data used across the business.
Benefits of Data Governance
There are several benefits that can be expected from an effective data governance strategy, including:
- Consistent data quality. Data governance creates a plan that ensures data validity, completeness, and consistency.
- Improved data management. Data governance provides a comprehensive view of all data assets. It establishes rules and best practices in data management.
- Data-driven decision-making. Smart decisions backed by data enable change management. This is especially true when data governance is coupled with a tool like DFR, which provides thorough analytics once data has been enriched.
- Increased revenue. Data governance means better findability of information. In other words, the errors that cause difficulty in locating data are removed, making product data discoverable—and saving you time and costly effort.
- Greater efficiency. As we've demonstrated above, having an understanding of product profitability helps you to weed out product lines that aren’t performing and invest in ones that show potential.
Successful Data Governance: 4 Key Principles
According to Gartner, “through 2022, only 20% of organizations investing in information will succeed in scaling governance for digital business.” If you fall outside of that percentage, follow these four steps to find success:
1. Cleanse Your Dirty Data
More often than not, data consumers are not aware that the data they need is available for use—it can sometimes take hours for them to find, understand, and place all data into context. The goal is to overcome these obstacles by bringing clarity, transparency, and accessibility to your data assets. Not cleansing your data puts your entire strategy at risk.
2. Centralize Trustworthy Data
Once your data is cleansed, it’s time to organize it for your data experts—and it all starts with trust. Trust is everything, even in data governance. This means having a plan in place to keep data secure when it’s not in use. Start by collecting all the datasets together somewhere that will be the cornerstone of your framework (e.g. your PLM system). Regrouping all the trusted data in one place and giving access to members so that everybody can immediately use it, protect it, and curate it is a great advantage of data governance.
3. Enable Data Access
Once all your data is cleansed and organized, it’s time to extract all its value by delivering to all those authorized. Not only will this control your data, but it also allows your data experts to find, understand, and share data faster. If you need support in getting your data cleansed and validated, at Convergence Data we offer an exclusive software for high-quality parts data called Design For Retrieval (DFR). DFR is custom-built and provides a one-stop solution for cleansing, enriching, and validating your data to leverage built-in analytics tools.
4. Implement Collaborative Governance
Upon implementing a data governance strategy, you will likely have a team that is responsible for creating and implementing effective plans and policies to manage your data. Their plan guarantees the collection, storage, and collaboration flows smoothly and effectively across your organization. A collaborative data governance strategy gives people the opportunity to realize the value of data and understand the benefits of managing it properly.
>>> Learn how DFR can enhance engineer productivity.
Get Our Data Services / Data Governance Package
Are you in need of ongoing data support? At Convergence Data, we promote data services and data governance as a package deal with our ongoing customer engagement relationships. Contact us today to make certain that your organization is positioned to maximize data governance investments.
