The top 5 reasons you need a data governance strategy

• Increased data volumes, velocities and new data types that can cause big inconsistencies, leading to decisions based on bad data sets
• More self-serve analytics users from across the business who need real-time access to clean, consistent data
• Increased regulatory requirements (like GDPR and CCPA) pushing companies to identify and classify sensitive data in their systems, such as PII data, including where it lives, how long it is kept, and how it is shared

Data is a valuable resource – but it needs refining

5 reasons why data governance is a must

1. Data governance ensures data quality and availability. The rise of self-serve BI and analytics has big implications for data governance, where the difference between a business user looking like a star or not in the boardroom can entirely depend on the quality of data on hand. Data governance as part of an organization-wide MDM strategy helps eliminate data silos between groups and departments, making quality data more available for users across the organization. Organizations can also apply schemas and metadata to stored data, so data scientists and business users can more easily “find, understand and join data of interest” for analysis purposes. This goes for data lakes, too – even though these repositories of unstructured data don’t necessarily need the same diligence as a data warehouse, some level of governance is still required to ensure your data lake doesn’t end up a mess. If there’s one thing that will irritate both business users and data scientists to no end, it’s having to work with obviously bad data.
2. Data governance ensures consistency. We’ve already mentioned the importance of ridding your organization of data silos while working from a “single version of the truth” – anything else is courting disaster. For an enterprise-wide data program to truly work, consistency across groups and departments is key in terms of both data quality and how data is understood. To keep things consistent, organizations should appoint a data steward (which can mean anything from a Chief Data Officer to a group of business users tasked with overseeing your governance program) to establish consistent data definitions, processes and terminology that can be applied across the business. 
3. Data governance helps you sell stuff more efficiently. At the end of the day it all comes down to sales, right? There are a few reasons why well-governed data can help your sales team do their jobs better: a. Bad or inconsistent customer data makes customer analytics a near-impossible task, in turn making it tough to upsell, cross-sell, or gauge customer experience. b. Siloed data between groups means your sales team isn’t working from a single version of the truth, which can lead to mistaken assumptions. c. Bad data may cause sales teams to outreach to customers or prospects at the wrong times – or, maybe even worse, to the wrong people altogether. d. Many customers are now very aware of their data rights, and will quickly lose faith in organizations that don’t manage data well or that get breached.
4. Data governance keeps you secure and compliant. The number of data privacy laws coming online in the last few years – including the EU’s GDPR, California’s CCPA, and Japan’s APPI, with even more on the way – along with the growing number of malicious threats mean organizations must stay on top of their data more than ever. Complying with ever-more-stringent regulations, with the power to levy massive fines, requires organizations to have a firm handle on their data and where it resides. And from a security perspective, badly governed data makes it difficult for systems or security experts to spot anomalies that could actually be threats. 
5. Data governance helps you let go of old, unnecessary data. A strong data governance program doesn’t just help you integrate and make available consistent data across the entire enterprise. It also helps you identify what data you don’t need anymore. ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) data is everywhere – accounting for around one-third of the average organization’s data – yet without a data governance strategy, it’s not easy to identify or find. This helps you determine which data you can or should destroy, and which you should consider putting on ice in cold storage. That means you’re paying less for data storage, while business users don’t have to wade through troves of useless, outdated information to get their insights.