It also establishes the processes that ensure optimum quality and security of the data used across a business or organisation. Data governance defines who can take what action, upon which data, in what situations, using what methods.

Data governance empowers businesses with a company-wide data management by efficiently using trustworthy information available. This management of data is a vital exercise that works on centralised control mechanisms. Data governance includes people, processes and technologies required to manage and protect the company’s data assets so as to ensure correct, complete, secure and easy-to-understand company information.

Data governance ensures that roles associated with data handling are clearly outlined, wherein the responsibility and accountability are defined and approved within the enterprise. A well-planned data governance framework covers strategic, tactical, and operational roles and responsibilities. A well-planned data governance strategy is the foundation of any organisation that works with big data. It assesses, defines and lays down how your business will benefit from consistent, common processes and responsibilities. Your data governance strategy should be derived from business drivers that point out the data which needs to be carefully controlled the benefits expected from it. This strategy forms the basis of your data governance framework.

Data Governance is often confused with different closely connected terms and ideas, like data management or master data management. However, data management is actually the management of the data lifecycle needs of a business. Data governance on the other hand, is the core of data management, along with other disciplines like data quality, reference and master data management, data security, database operations, metadata management, and data warehousing.

Data governance is also mistaken for master data management (MDM) which actually focuses on using key entities of a business to enhance the quality of data. MDM ensures that you have all accurate information regarding the key entities of the business in a manner when they are shared across the organisation, the fragmented views can be streamlined as one consolidated view. However, MDM cannot be successful without efficient data governance. A data governance program outlines the master data models, the retention policies for data, and lays the guidelines for the roles and responsibilities for data authoring, curating, and access.

Data governance ensures that the right people area assigned the appropriate data responsibilities. Data governance takes care of strategy, roles, organisation, and policies.

An effective data governance strategy provides several advantages to a company:

• A common understanding of data
• Improved quality of data
• Data map
• A 360-degree view of every client and business entity
• Consistent compliance
• Improved data management

Data Governance Tools

In order to identify the suitable data governance approach for your organization, look for open source, scalable tools that allow quick and economic integration with the existing environment of your business. As you begin comparing and identifying data governance tools, look for the one that will enhance business benefits that your data governance strategy emphasises.

Some factors to keep in consideration are:

• Capture and understand data through discovery, profiling, and benchmarking tools and capabilities
• Improve the quality of data with validation, data cleansing, and enrichment
• Manage data with metadata-driven and data integration applications
• Control your data with tools that actively review and monitor
• Document your data in a manner to increase its relevance, searchability, accessibility, linkability, and compliance

As businesses grow and expand, there is unimaginable amount of data that they generate, be it regarding customers, clients, vendors, suppliers, employees, etc. All this data needs to be checked for inconsistencies or duplication and entered correctly for better business strategies. Constant data governance ensures that data is well-documented and simple to search within your organization, maintaining security, compliance, and confidentiality.

Now that we have established the importance of data governance, it is also imperative to know that despite its benefits, several businesses are hesitant in implementing it due to general uncertainty. Implementing data governance policies can be a daunting exercise. It is recommended to start with a manageable application-specific project and to continue in a systematic manner. This helps you stay in control of a manageable project till you get the hang of a data governance policy, enabling you to further expand your data governance program with volumes of data or complicated data coming in within the company.

Businesses are beginning to realise that their data should be clean and enriched in order to maximise the advantage of transactional information. To use data as a strategic asset, businesses need to empower their technology and processes to manage the long term quality of their data. Data governance controls the standard of data to provide consistent and accurate data that business users can utilise for critical decisions. Data governance programs help enhance the strategic and operational levels of a business. To make full use of data in this context, data governance programs cannot be a one-time implementation process but rather, an ongoing and repetitive process.

Data is an important and strategic tool for any organisation. With increasing volumes of data streaming into organisations these days in structured and unstructured formats, it is imperative to be able to extract the right data at the right time to the right people to help a business grow and utilise new opportunities. Make sure that your organisation is positioned to maximise data governance investments and minimize risk of data breaches. In today’s fast paced technology driven era, it is more than ever important to have data governance in order to stay responsive. It also opens up

The long term impact of data needs to be recognised as a valued asset and treated in a consistent manner through an effective data governance strategy to empower businesses for further growth.