Managing and Governing Data Throughout its Lifecycle
Data analytics is a key part of strategic business planning and decision-making. However, if your organisation's data is not managed effectively, it can lead to poor decisions that can damage your company's reputation and financial health. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure the quality and compliance of your organisation's data throughout its lifecycle.
Data often begins its journey through an organisation as raw, unstructured data.
Data often begins its journey through an organisation as raw, unstructured data. It needs to be transformed into something that the business can use. This means it must be structured, organised and tagged; cleaned, validated and tested; integrated with other data sources; and governed according to compliance requirements.
Data is then interpreted and categorised or tagged with a taxonomy and metadata, where it becomes governed data.
Data is then interpreted and categorised or tagged with a taxonomy and meta data, where it becomes governed data.
Data Governance (or Data Management) is the process of keeping track of your company's data. It includes defining policies for its use, implementing those policies, monitoring compliance to them, managing its lifecycle from creation to retirement and disposal. A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that represents the structure of knowledge about some subject area. Taxonomies are used for organising large bodies of information in libraries or on websites like Wikipedia. Meta-data is additional information about data such as provenance (information about who created it), authority (information about who owns it) or history (an audit trail). Meta-data management involves managing this additional non-structural metadata associated with structured content such as documents or databases so that users can easily find what they need within applications that operate on top of these technologies
The next step in the organisation's lifecycle of data is where it becomes managed data.
Data is used by multiple people.
Data is used for multiple purposes.
Users collaborate with other users, or with external partners and vendors, often sharing data as part of the process.
Data is stored in a central location that can be accessed by multiple applications simultaneously, so that it can be accessed quickly and easily when needed. This means that the organisation's data infrastructure needs to be able to support these high-volume access requirements without sacrificing performance or availability—which brings us right back to why an enterprise-grade database platform makes sense here!
Finally, the analysed data that has met business requirements becomes distributed data.
Finally, the analysed data that has met business requirements becomes distributed data. Distributed data is used by the business to meet its objectives and goals. As such, it's important to understand that a governance structure must be in place to ensure that the intended uses of distributed data are aligned with organisational mandates.
Manage and govern your data to ensure quality and compliance across your organisation.
Data governance is the process of ensuring that data quality, security and compliance are maintained throughout the lifecycle of data. It is a set of best practices that ensure that data is used in an effective manner and remains secure.
Data governance can be applied to any organisation's information assets, including paper documents, emails, phone calls and records management systems (such as SharePoint).
While managing and governing data is a process that can be complex, it’s also one that can have an enormous impact on the success of your organisation. By ensuring that your data is high-quality, complete, and compliant with all relevant regulations, you’ll be able to support your business goals while protecting yourself from costly penalties.