The ability to collect and process data has increased exponentially in the past 20 years and the cloud is at the core of this dramatic change. Businesses can now store and easily access large amounts of information, and while we have the technological tools to mine this data, what’s often lagging is our understanding of it. To get the most from it, everyone in the organization needs to understand how to access it, keep it secure and think critically about its potential use cases and applications.
While it’s true that data scientists spend their days crunching and analyzing data, that doesn’t let the rest of the organization off the hook. In fact, data literacy is becoming an important universal skillset. Even the ability to take data from a spreadsheet and create a table is a necessary requirement in many jobs. But the ability to shape that data, present it accurately, and critically assess the value of the information, is less common.
To increase data literacy in your organization, examine each person’s role and to what degree they might require “data education.” Consider these three core components of data literacy: understanding, access and analysis.
Let’s say your employees are data literate-- able to understand, access, and analyze data. Does this mean anyone has permission to access any data? In a word, no. With the immense amount of information available, culled from so many sources, privacy and security must be scrupulously maintained. It is, in fact, an ethical issue. Hence, structuring and controlling the data at every level becomes paramount.
data governance is how organizations manage, use, and protect data. It encompasses quality of data, maintenance, access, and security. At every stage of its lifecycle, data must be governed. This lifecycle begins with the acquisition of data, and continues through storage, synthesis, usage, publication (through analytics and products), archival, and purge. For example, acquisition is not just about the original provenance of the data but the frequency and reliability of updates. At some point, data must be deleted, too. The organization may lose the rights to it or may not need it anymore. This type of data hygiene is all a part of proper data governance.
With the scope of data governance wide-reaching, to help guide organizations, industry associations like the EDM Council have been created to elevate the practice of data management as a business and operational priority. When it comes to data governance, there are some critical foundational elements:
Establish an internal structure to oversee data.
