We live in a data-driven culture, which means that as a business leader, you probably have more data than you know what to do with. To gain control over your data, it is essential to implement a data governance strategy that considers the business needs of every level, from basement to boardroom. A proper data governance strategy will help clarify roles, responsibilities, and decision-making and produce more informed business insights that keep your organization ahead of its competition.
Yet, implementing and enforcing a practical data governance framework can be challenging. The rapid pace of data collection and the sheer number of data sources many organizations have can make it difficult to track where data is and who has access. This can lead to data silos, making it impossible to properly utilize that data across your organization. Likewise, poor data quality and a lack of data lineage, or the record of how data has changed, means you won’t be able to ensure compliance, putting your entire organization at risk.
To solve this, many organizations invest in business analytics solutions to better track their data and how it is being used. However, standalone BI applications can be costly and complex, making it difficult for most users to utilize them. A better solution is to embed BI within the applications where your data already lives. Here’s how this can help strengthen your data governance efforts:
1. Improve data comprehension and usability. The learning curve for standalone BI software can be steep, making it unlikely that most of your employees will take full advantage of it. In contrast, embedded BI automatically operates within the applications your employees are already using. This means they can quickly access and visualize data lineage, permissions, and more, making it easier to enforce and follow the data governance framework. When departments can access data that is clean and easy to work with, they can quickly engage in data-intensive tasks like analytics and reporting across the organization.
2. Eliminate compliance difficulties. Adhering to compliance requirements can be difficult when analyzing data, especially when exporting it from its source to another BI application. Without a lengthy migration process, this can quickly run afoul of regulatory or privacy considerations. Instead, by bundling analytical capabilities alongside the data, maintaining compliance becomes much more manageable. Data can be analyzed, interpreted, and visualized wherever it is used. Additionally, embedded BI supports files from various sources, databases, warehouses, and big data integration, wherever your data governance framework states data must be stored. Secure, streamlined connectivity allows your organizations to remain compliant, no matter where your data is.
3. Bolster security. Analyzing data and building out visualizations and reports can produce valuable insights. Still, it can also introduce security risks if viewers don’t have the proper permissions to access the data being used. In data governance, security is key. Embedded BI supports security by giving the right users the tools to configure access settings, authenticate new users, and manage permissions for data right at its source. This can vastly streamline and strengthen security by eliminating the need to comb through analytics reports for possible issues.
4. Enhance data quality. Integrating BI capabilities with data management inside an application can make it much easier for you to identify ways to make those operations more efficient. For instance, it may reveal that a set of data needs to be properly utilized or that another set is being relied on too heavily and producing a possible bias. With embedded BI, users can quickly validate the effectiveness and quality of the data within an application, ensuring the right users get the correct information.
Putting a data governance framework in place is key to gaining control of your organization’s information and ensuring you continue to produce valuable, actionable insights. Embedding BI into the applications where your data is will help simplify this process and ensure your data governance remains effective.