A Guide to Data Democratization
When we speak of business data, there are a lot of the coming from many different sources. Businesses are pressured to use insights gathered from data in order to improve the performance of the business. Because of the vast amount of data to process and the availability of new tech that will allow non-technical people make use of the data, data democratization is being desired and demanded for.
With data democratization, data will be available to anyone who needs access to it and there will be no gatekeepers that can create a bottleneck at the data gateway. If data is to be made available to all, then there is a need to have tools that will make regular people understand the data so that they can make fast decisions and find more opportunities for the organization. The goal of data democratization is to let anybody use data any time for their decisions making such that access or understanding is not hindered.
Without data democratization, data will only be owned by IT departments. While business units like marketing, executives, and business analysts use data for their decision making, getting this data had to be through the IT department. The handling of data by the IT department has been the practice for many decades now.
For proponents of data democratization, giving data access to all teams will help gain a competitive advantage. An easy and quick access to data by different people of different expertise in your organization, then your organization will be able to identify and act of critical business insights. Making decisions can be faster for different departments who are allowed easy access to data.
Some quarters feel that if you let anybody have access to data that they will misinterpret the data which will result in bad decision making. If data is accessible to anyone, then there will be great security risk and challenges to maintaining the integrity of the data. There will also be a duplication of efforts across teams that could cost a company much than a centralized analysis group.
The attraction of data democratization comes from the fact that there is an incredible amount of data that is created. And besides, today you can find many tech innovations, that can help non-technical people make sense of the data.
A strong governance is necessary for an organization that democratizes data so that their data is carefully managed. There should be proper training for anyone on how to best use the data to drive company initiatives and progress.
If employees at all levels are allowed to gain access to and insights from data collected by the organization, then it will revolutionize the business decision-making. However, the impact of full data democratization across all enterprise is yet to be known.