Top 3 Reasons Why Data Governance Is Essential

in Data
Data is the lifeblood of organizations. Every day huge volumes of data are created, shared, exchanged, stored, maintained and processed. However, companies are often unable to handle data efficiently. This is because they fail to maintain data in a consistent, synchronized manner. Often, different names are given to the same data across systems, causing duplication. Also, it becomes very difficult for business-users to integrate core data for management or compliance purposes because most companies lack an integrated system for maintaining core data to support business-user reporting. All these indicate the need for a robust method to control and mange data. And this is what Data Governance is all about.

Enterprise Data Governance is defined as a series of processes by which all structured and unstructured data assets are formally managed to guarantee commonly understood, trusted data throughout the enterprise.

Why is Data Governance Essential?

Uncontrolled or unmanaged data can have several negative repercussions. Most importantly, it can affect business at three main levels:

1. Operations: Improper management of data can have an impact on business operations, as data is unavailable or not retrievable at the critical time of need. And often employees, customers, and other stakeholders struggle to get hold of required data. Incomplete data can also cause defects in business processes and lead to customer dissatisfaction. Data unavailability, on the other hand, can slow down operations, thus hampering performance and productivity.

2. Decision-making: Since most organizational decisions heavily rely on business data, improper data management can lead to incorrect decision-making or poor-quality decisions. It can even result in inability to make decisions at all. Information plays a crucial role in the decision-making process, but without the required data, it is impossible to make the right decisions.

3. Compliance: Unavailability of data, inaccuracy of data, or poor data maintenance can lead to violations of regulatory standards and trigger legal action. Monitoring, managing, and protecting key data assets are no longer business decisions but are now mandatory. With immense growth in the volumes of data and electronic data storage, the challenges in data management have become manyfold.

In order to prevent these problems and to ensure effective IT compliance, an efficient data governance system is a prerequisite. Organizations have therefore begun to adopt an integrated approach to data governance and compliance management with automated governance risk and compliance solutions offered by IT security consultants. These solutions enable companies to incorporate governance and security measures in day-to-day business operations, thereby making the complex task of data governance much simpler.

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This article was published on 2010/10/13