An organization's data is its most important asset. Many of today's greatest business challenges are essentially data governance challenges.
This includes cybersecurity, where knowing where your data lives – and who has access to it – plays a critical role mitigating the risk of crippling ransomware attacks. It's true for customer relationship management, where personalized multi-channel experiences can improve sales by up to 20%. The list goes on.
The ability to manage, store, and analyze data effectively is foundational to enterprise success in today's environment. In order to do that, organizations are increasingly treating data as an asset. Like any other asset, it needs to be measured, governed, and optimized for value.
Data governance encompasses the tools and techniques enterprises use to do that. It covers the ability to have people, processes, and information technology working together to reinforce the consistent handling of enterprise data. For enterprise IT professionals interested in data governance, the key word here is "consistency".
Reltio Data Governance webinar:
Data Stewards Enable Consistent Data Practices
The famous management guru Peter Drucker once said something like, you can't manage what you don't measure. In order to be able to measure things effectively, the measuring technique must be consistent. When it comes to data, that means establishing uniform practices to analyze curated data in a way that results in valuable insight.
For most organizations, the first step towards achieving that goal is identifying and communicating with your data stewards.
It's common for organizations to reach out to master data management vendors like Reltio and say they don't have data stewards. They might say they want to get data stewards, but don't know where to begin.
But it's almost always the case that they do, in fact, have data stewards already. They just haven't identified who those individuals are. It's an informal identity, instead of a formalized role.
The reality of doing business in today's environment is that everyone in your organization knows who to contact if they need specific information. Your customer service department might have a particularly tech-savvy lead who fields informal requests for customer service data. Over time, that person becomes the "go-to" employee for information from that department. That is a data steward.
When this role is informal, it becomes an obstacle to achieving consistent data governance. There is no standardized structure for your data stewards to refer to when fielding requests, so they create their own. Those ad-hoc systems and formats don't always match up with one another, introducing inconsistency into your enterprise data.
Reltio Formalizes Data Stewardship in a Consistent Way
This is where Reltio comes into play. The goal of the data steward is to protect, store, and communicate data. When data stewards have an efficient, formalized structure for doing that, the entire organization benefits. Reltio is focused on giving you the ability to manage your data in a way that improves governance, performance, and quality.
One of the areas where many companies fall short is having many layers of disparate technologies that output data in a wide variety of formats. These formats are not always compatible or well-structured. As a result, two people working in two different systems may have entirely different priorities when it comes to the data they are using.
Reltio establishes a central repository for data that becomes the starting point for all of these interactions. It's a cloud-based solution that protects data while making it available to authorized management. It takes in data from all of your applications – from cloud-native apps like Salesforce to on-premises legacy systems – and consolidates that data in a structured way.
This is the point where enterprises can start building out consistent processes to manage and improve the quality of their data. Once the data is consolidated into a single, uniform point of reference, you can successfully measure it, analyze it, and improve it.
When the quality of any asset diminishes, the organization that owns it loses money. When the quality of an asset improves, the organization earns or saves money. Data governance is really just the logical consequence of treating data as a value-generating asset.
How Effective Data Governance Improves the Value of Data As an Asset
This is just the first part of a content series that will dive in-depth into some of the ways that Reltio helps enterprises optimize the value of their data. Some of the areas that we will cover include:
- Security. Data is always encrypted in motion, and always encrypted at rest. Authentication and access is controlled at the organizational level. Provisioning, authentication, and permissions are major elements of enterprise data governance, and play a vital role establishing the value of data and preventing catastrophic data loss.
- Quality Control. Consistent data enables consistent product improvement. Lean methodologies like Six Sigma are powered by effective data management, and can have a powerful impact on profits, employee morale, and brand reputation. The concepts of Six Sigma can also be applied to your data management processes.
- Collaboration. Communication is the cornerstone of effective data governance. Data informs the creation and improvement of business workflows. Custom workflows make it possible for managers and data stewards to eliminate inefficiencies in their systems. But those changes must be grounded in data. Reltio's workflow designer makes this possible.
- Automation. This is one of the most valuable developments in recent years. Enterprises that automate the transmission of data throughout the organization are able to achieve incredible growth and agility. Reviews, approvals, and compliance requirements are examples of tasks that cost a great deal of time and effort to perform manually. Enterprises cannot establish automated solutions to these problems without a robust data governance system in place.
Enhance Enterprise Data Governance with Reltio
These are just some of the areas where effective data governance, powered by a robust master data management platform, helps enterprises optimize workflows. The way your organization treats data is key to its capacity to thrive in today's hyper-connected environment, and a key predictor of long-term success. Keep an eye out for follow-up content that will dive into how Reltio's master data management solution helps improve security, quality control, collaboration, and automation in the enterprise environment.