Finance and Accounting
Data governance in enterprise reporting: Best practices for success
Data is at the heart of every modern organisation, with businesses capturing, storing, and analysing data from multiple resources. But without proper organisation and quality control, making data-driven decisions can be challenging. Focusing on enterprise data governance can help you access consistent, accurate data while ensuring effective data organisation, utilisation, and protection.
What is enterprise data governance?
Enterprise data governance is a set of policies and procedures that make sure accurate and usable data is accessible to relevant stakeholders. It encompasses the entire data lifecycle – creation, storage, use, and destruction – and the people, processes, and technologies necessary to manage and protect the enterprise data assets.
An effective enterprise data governance strategy can help you design and develop the right infrastructure to support your data needs, create and maintain the corresponding policies and procedures, and define the data rights every individual has. As a result, you have a data governance process flow that indicates what data your organisation has, where you store it, who can access and share the data and how, what you can use the data for, and much more.
Enterprise data governance benefits and challenges
Since data is an integral part of every aspect of modern businesses, the benefits of effective data governance are countless. Although most companies employ some form of data governance process flows for individual applications, the overreaching benefits of effective data management can emerge with systematic data governance at the enterprise level. Some of the key benefits that enterprise data governance can offer include:
- Addressing fundamental data challenges
- Ensuring the data reflects reality to support data-driven decision-making
- Automating repetitive data-related tasks
- Enabling data democratisation
- Ensuring data accuracy, integrity, and confidentiality
- Facilitating collaboration and a data-centric culture
- Maintaining a single version of the truth with real-time data updates
- Ensuring regulatory compliance and data security
- Streamlining operations to optimise costs and improve productivity
However, designing and implementing an effective enterprise data governance strategy is not a straightforward task. It needs investment in building teams and resources, meticulous planning, and continuous monitoring. The top challenges when it comes to data governance include:
- Stringent compliance requirements
- Data access bureaucracy
- Data ownership and control
- Ability to demonstrate business value
- Disparate data sources and siloed data
- Lack of data leadership and resources
- Poor data quality and context
Enterprise data governance best practices
Although the list of challenges to effective data governance may seem daunting, the potential benefits far outweigh the concerns. The specifics of the enterprise data governance strategy for your organisation may depend on your data processes, needs, and goals. But here are some core enterprise data governance best practices that can help you overcome the challenges and leverage the benefits of effective data governance for future-proof growth prospects:
- Lead with your “why” or an overreaching purpose for data governance encompassing your goals and visions, how you want to deliver value, and how it aligns with your business objectives. This can help your team understand and actively participate in building an effective enterprise data governance strategy.
- Adopt a “data product” mindset, looking at data as an invaluable asset that can help you gain valuable business insights. This mindset must encompass the entire data lifecycle – from collecting raw data to building KPI dashboards and more.
- Embed collaboration in data governance process flows making it easier for different teams to easily collaborate, share insights, or access data assets with the tools of their choice.
- Automate wherever possible to eliminate error-prone manual data processes to make sure you can keep up with the exploding volume of data.
- Facilitate data enablement with DataOps – improving integration, communication, and automation of data flows between different data owners and end-users. A data-product mindset is integral here, allowing you to deliver value to individual end-users and the business as a whole.
- Invest in the right technology to make sure you can future-proof your enterprise data governance while ensuring an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with customisable tools that facilitate collaboration for your end-users.
- Keep evolving your enterprise data governance outlook to adapt to the rapidly evolving data landscape and technological capabilities.
Following these core best practices can help you overcome major data governance challenges and set your enterprise data governance strategy up for success.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Effective data governance is an integral part of leveraging your data assets and staying agile in today’s data-driven market. Infosys BPM enterprise reporting services can help you eliminate lengthy planning cycles, reliance on historical information, and inconsistent reporting to drive operational efficiencies and offer timely business insights. Our extensive expertise can help you strategies, design, transform, and manage your data governance process flows to help you leverage the benefits of enterprise data governance and stay competitive in today’s data economy.
