Every decision and action that affects your business is only as good as the data that supports it. This means the ability to achieve and sustain trustworthy data delivers value far beyond regulatory compliance.
Compliance: Just a Beginning
You know demonstrable compliance with regulations ranging from GDPR to HIPAA to SOC 2 is impossible without demonstrably accurate, timely, and trustworthy data. But compliance is just part of the business value of trustworthy data. Data your business can trust also helps to maximize customer satisfaction, minimize business risk and improve decision-making. Trustworthy data can also help to mitigate end-user computing (EUC) risk, a rapidly growing and evolving challenge. These factors translate into significant business value, even for businesses with minimal compliance requirements.
However, there are also significant challenges to achieving and sustaining trustworthy business data. Information is often spread across multiple data silos, with little to no version control or ways to guarantee accuracy or consistency. Inconsistent or inadequate data governance can exacerbate these problems and contribute to poor data quality. And, of course, there are near-constant and ever-evolving threats to data security, from ransomware to phishing attacks and beyond.
How to Achieve and Sustain Data Trustworthiness
To address these challenges effectively and consistently requires a collaborative and coordinated set of efforts. Those responsible for oversight of analytics, business units, and IT have critical roles to play and specific responsibilities for enabling and sustaining data trustworthiness within their organizations.
Analytics leaders are the primary “gateway” between end-users, including data analysts and scientists, and the enterprise’s data management and analytics strategies. Analytics leaders are primarily responsible for crafting and implementing organizational analytics strategies. They must then translate those strategies into specific policies, processes, and actions that maximize data trustworthiness and business value across the enterprise.
Business leaders must make the best possible decisions to drive ROI and business growth. They must work with analytics leaders and their teams to ensure that major business decisions are driven by data that is trustworthy, actionable, and aligned with business needs and goals.
IT leaders are responsible for implementing and managing the technology infrastructures that enable and support data management and analytics. IT leaders and their teams must deliver solutions that help make and keep data accurate, secure, timely, and trustworthy. IT leaders must also work with analytics and business leaders to ensure that all authorized users have access to the data, applications, and services they need to drive business success and minimize risk.
Leaders from all three of these disciplines must also collaborate with those responsible for data management, data quality, data security, and cybersecurity to develop and implement adequate data governance practices. At a minimum, those practices must include clearly defined goals and actions focused on data quality and security. They should also include specific guidelines for oversight and management of corporate metadata and data lineage management.
Your organization’s policies and practices must be enabled and supported by technologies that can manage and secure critical data across its entire lifecycle. And your policies, practices, and technologies must enable effective management of all of your critical data, whether it resides in complex spreadsheets or citizen-developed applications, databases, or services. The right combination of collaborations, policies, practices, and technologies can ensure your organization can rely upon trustworthy data today and tomorrow.
How Incisive Can Help
At Incisive Software, we’re committed to helping organizations build a strong foundation for success based on accurate and trustworthy data. With the growing reliance on citizen-developed applications, low-code/no-code and open-source tools, and complex spreadsheets, the risks of data errors and mismanagement have become greater than ever before. We’re dedicated to providing innovative solutions that empower organizations to reduce their exposure to these risks, improve data quality and enable confident decision-making. By combining automation, modern technologies, and proven practices, our solutions bring greater accuracy, control, and insight to the management of an organization’s most complex, critical, and sensitive data resources. To learn more, please visit https://www.incisive.com.
