Data democratization tips for your business
The data talent pool is not keeping up with data project demand. With these tips, learn to combat the shortage with business data democratization.
There’s no shortage of clichés for why enterprises should care about data, but talking about the importance of data and making it useful for enterprises are two very different things.
Over the past few years, data democratization has become a rallying cry for enterprises hoping to make better use of their data, and vendors hoping to sell magic solutions toward that goal.
What is data democratization, and how can enterprises tap into this trend to hone and better leverage their employees’ data practices?
Data democratization is often wrongly assumed to be all about access; that is, some suggest it’s for ensuring that “every user in the organization, regardless of their technical prowess, can have access to data for timely and more insightful decision-making.”
But access is only part of the equation, and not the most important part, as astorik founder, Arpit Choudhury, has correctly called out: “Data democratization is the ongoing process of enabling everybody in an organization, irrespective of their technical know-how, to work with data comfortably, to feel confident talking about it, and as a result, make data-informed decisions and build customer experiences powered by data.”
In other words, it’s not really about making data available to everyone, but rather actively enabling employees to use data well.
Since data democratization is about both access and appropriate training, what steps does your organization need to take in order to increase data democratization and ultimately benefit from it?
Traditionally, enterprises have kept data locked down and accessible to only a chosen few. While this may seem like a reasonable way to ensure security, it’s a terrible way to facilitate data-driven decisions. As Saul Judah, VP analyst at Gartner, has argued, data governance must embrace “speed and agility,” which has rendered “traditional approaches to data governance … obsolete.”
As such, companies increasingly depend upon tooling that opens up access to data for faster, more efficient data-driven projects across the organization.
To make data more broadly accessible, data governance tools are increasingly incorporating policy and stewardship management capabilities, thus simplifying access for a wider variety of user roles. Data governance tools also often have AI/ML and associated capabilities built in from the start. Finally, and importantly, organizations increasingly rely on data catalogs from vendors like Alation to constantly crawl through an enterprise’s data and make it broadly searchable, Google-style.
While enterprises need to ensure that data professionals like data analysts or data scientists have access to data, true data democratization is recognizing that every role can be improved with heightened access to useful data.
As much as we like to trumpet technology as the fix for data democratization, it’s perhaps even more important to focus on improving employees’ ability to read and understand data. True, this is partly a technology issue, but it’s much more than this.
Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data. Enterprises should emphasize and improve their employees’ ability to understand and use data — not just access to the tools used to ingest or analyze that data.
