What is Data Democratization?
Data democratization has become an essential focus for any enterprise striving to become truly data driven. Data democratization is the concept that universal access to data can transform companies by unleashing the value of information locked within organizational data stores. The goal is to have anybody use data at any time to identify new opportunities, create revenue streams and augment business growth.
Why is Data Democratization Important?
Data democratization doesn’t mean that everyone sees all the data all the time, but rather that the right people can access the right data at the right time for the right purpose. Granting broader data access requires cultural change that breaks down information silos and allows users to access the broader enterprise data ecosystem. The goal is to enable free flow of information to power business agility—anybody can use data at any time to make decisions without barriers to data access or understanding.
What are the Benefits?
The premise of data democratization is to empower users to access digital information regardless of where it resides, without involving IT. As a result, data democratization demands that organizations rethink how they manage, distribute, and consume data.
To enable this self-service data approach, organizations must collapse their departmental data silos to free customer and external data and establish a borderless information ecosystem.
Disrupting established enterprise protocols related to data accessibility requires a data program with several best practices:
- Business users exposed to certain data need to understand what it is and what it means. Collaborative business glossaries use a common language to fill the gap between what the data means and how it should be applied.
- Inconsistencies among data sets pulled from different sources need to be resolved. A well-defined data quality program should be in place to “clean” and transform the data to ensure that it aligns with the business purpose.
- Executive leadership teams must adopt a new perspective—one that actively embraces increased data access and use while mitigating risks. One effective mitigation strategy involves clearly defined data governance practices that ensure data privacy and security, data quality, data ownership, and compliance.
How Precisely Can Help?
To enable a self-service data approach that empowers data democratization, Precisely offers the Data Integrity Suite, which is built on a shared data catalog. This foundational component breaks down data silos with its persona-based design, providing a user-friendly, personalized experience that tailors information to individual needs with an intuitive card-cased homepage.
Additionally, with the Data Integrity Suite’s Data Governance service, leverage our most advanced data governance solution to control data policy, meaning, usage, ownership, and more to further ensure data democratization across the organization.