As Chief Data Officers, our primary focus often revolves around driving data-driven commercial success. We strive to extract insights, enhance decision-making, and generate revenue streams from our data assets. Yet, there is a critical foundation upon which this data-driven empire is built – and that’s data governance. I want to shed light on why a commercially minded CDO must equally champion the principles of good data governance.
In today’s business landscape, data plays a pivotal role in creating competitive advantage. It fuels innovation, identifies trends, and uncovers opportunities. Consequently, CDOs have increasingly turned their attention to commercial aspects of data. And that’s great! After all, the aim of any data initiative is to drive business growth.
However, the pursuit of data’s commercial potential should never overshadow the importance of data governance. Data governance isn’t a buzzword; it’s the bedrock upon which your data initiatives stand.
Here’s why it matters:
- Data Quality and Trust: Imagine making decisions based on inaccurate or untrustworthy data. Data governance ensures data quality, accuracy, and reliability. It establishes trust in your data, an essential element for making commercial decisions.
- Compliance and Risk Management: In an era of stringent data privacy regulations, non-compliance can be costly. Data governance ensures that your data practices align with legal requirements, reducing risks and potential legal repercussions.
- Effective Data Management: Without data governance, your data quickly becomes a mess. I’ve discovered instances where what should be a data lake is referred to as a data swamp with a lack of data governance creating a murky out of control environment where nothing makes sense. Good governance simplifies data management. If makes data easier to find, access and use to generate actionable insight for your business.
- Data Security: A breach or mishandling of data can tarnish your organization’s reputation and result in financial losses. Data governance strategies, include access controls and encryption and policies that bolster your data’s security.
- Scalability: As your data operations grow, governance ensures that your data remains structured and scalable. It paves the way for long-term success and the ability to react to business opportunities.
- Data Monetisation: In the quest to monetise data, data governance is the guardian of data ethics and responsible data usage. It ensures that revenue-generation efforts align with ethical and legal standards along with the overall vision and mission for your company.
- Silo Removal: Data governance aligns data across departments and ensures that the use of data for business purposes is aligned with broader organisational objectives and helps teams work together.
Finding the Balance:
A commercially focused CDO can drive the organization towards financial success, but it should never be at the expense of data governance. Both must exist in harmony.
Approaches:
- Create data-driven culture: Find the data governance drivers that impact business success and encourage your business to value data governance as much as they value business success as one invariably leads to the other. Education and training and finding the links between sound data governance and business success is critical here.
- Prioritise Data Governance: Make data governance a foundational component of any data initiative.
- Align Data Governance Objectives with Commercial Goals: Ensure that your data governance efforts are clearly aligned to business metrics. Without this our Data Governance initiatives are undertaken because that’s what the textbook said.
- Invest in Data Governance Tools: Leverage technology and tools to streamline data governance practices, making it easier to manage and protect your data assets.
- Data Governance Metrics: Find the right data governance metrics for your business and then continuously monitor and audit to identify areas for improvement keeping alignment to your business objectives.
While the allure of data-driven success cannot be denied, a CDO should never forget the foundations of data governance. Data Driven success and Data Governance are interdependent, and one cannot thrive without the other. A CDO with strong Data Governance structures in place is poised for sustainable success in today’s data-driven world.