The governance landscape has become increasingly complicated as CIOs and business teams take on new initiatives to modernize fundamental lines of business systems with self-service, AI, cloud migration, and data migration.
For successful data governance, organizations need to employ the right combination of people, processes, and data integration technology. Take a look at these ways to build a solid foundation for data governance.
Safeguard Your Data
Safeguarding an asset is extremely essential. Otherwise, the results can prove detrimental.
In a recent Netflix series called Money Heist, we could see that millions of dollars in Kentucky bourbon barrels were left unsafe, and the results weren’t pretty.
If data is an asset, then we must protect it. Or else, like in Money Heist, things will go wrong.
Data integration platforms empower users to ensure data governance by building security into data management. Encryption, authentication, and authorization can do the heavy lifting here. If a business user takes a self-service integration approach, then they can achieve data security without burdening IT and business users both.
Self-service integration solutions proffer an end-to-end encrypted environment that allows only authenticated users to access, integrate, and use data with ease and speed. That can minimize the risks of breaches and thefts.
Identify the Most Valuable Data
Business users must identify the single source of truth across their fundamental data entities to unlock its true value and make business decisions accordingly. In doing so, they need to spend some time determining which data entities provide the most value first.
For example, trading organizations need to look into the trades, their counterparts, and financial instruments. Manufacturing units need to look at the purchase orders (PO), inventory information, and supply chain data, etc.
Through this process, often organizations will find out that their key data is being updated and sometimes created in multiple data systems by different people. This leads to different versions of the truth. Self-service integration platforms enable business users to get a single source of truth for their data entities. Once they can do that, the process of insights delivery speeds up. And users can quickly leverage that insightful information to make business decisions and deliver value.
Empower Your Citizen Integrators
Business users must also empower their citizen integrators with the right tools.
It’s fair to say that IT struggles to keep up with operations and support. Business users have found ways to compensate for the resource dependency called citizen integration.
Companies can employ self-service integration solutions to empower even non-technical business users and turn them into “citizen integrators” to create data connections in minutes instead of months. This frees IT to focus on more important tasks, enabling innovation and growth.
Even though citizen integrators have long integrated data to achieve data accessibility, self-service integration systems can enable them by providing better guidance and structure to this access. Features like pre-built application connectors, shared templates, monitoring dashboards, etc. play a vital role in empowering even non-technical business users to create connections and integrate new customers – securely and easily.
As business users become empowered to handle processes like data onboarding and data integration, IT users can take up the governance role. IT teams can govern and monitor data streams and processes associated with it, which frees them to focus on more high-value tasks.
Ensure API-Led Connectivity
Business users need to build an API-led application network to ensure the reuse of data across applications while maintaining the integrity and quality of data streams. Consequently, the problem of replication and duplication of data reduces to a large extent.
Now, organizations today need to handle all kinds of data or records — residing in enterprise applications in the data center and SaaS applications on a cloud platform. By taking an API-led connectivity approach, users can integrate these two different data sets and easily present them as a single source.
Embark on Your Data Governance Journey
As you take all these steps, it’s easier for you to improve data governance and thus take the business forward. By leveraging these next-level solutions properly, you can gain better insights into your partner data and use it to make decisions. As a result, you can improve the ease of doing business and generate revenue at speed and scale.