Unlocking Data’s Value: Transitioning From Data Governance 1.0 to 2.0

In today’s increasingly digitized world, data is arguably an organization’s most important asset. Its versatility and ability to provide crucial business insights and understanding tie directly to the 3 Rs — Revenue Generation, Risk Mitigation & Return on Investment. Current economic challenges and uncertainty catapult these concerns to the top of mind for today’s business leaders.

How does data help unlock revenue growth?

The ways data can be leveraged to drive revenue growth are as varied as the data itself. Most notably, when data is thoughtfully analyzed deeper, insights into existing and potential customers come to light. Data driven insights also help identify opportunities to enhance products, associated features and services, and can even help identify future demands of customers and/or the marketplace.

How does data help with risk mitigation?

Legal, risk, and compliance teams benefit from greater visibility to gaps in security, processes, and controls — reducing the risk of being out of compliance.

How does data help realize a return on investment?

Increased visibility and understanding of process and technology utilization provides insights into adoption rates of new systems, technology, processes, and intellectual property (IP). This enhanced understanding helps organizations and their stakeholders accelerate and realize a quicker return on investment across all facets of the business.

For businesses to reap these benefits, leaders must make the conscious shift from Data Governance 1.0, which focuses on compliance and record keeping and is largely untapped to drive value, to fully embracing Data Governance 2.0’s best practices to generate value from data and promote efficiency across the organization. Making this leap requires the democratization of data, introduction of policies that serve as gateways for productivity and resilience, and reframing data quality as a value generation metric.

Breaking Down Barriers to Data

Data Governance 1.0 principles are often viewed or interpreted as a statistic or a byproduct of work. An effective transition to Data Governance 2.0 places a strong emphasis on individual and team empowerment while creating efficiencies for leveraging data to drive value.

When data is at employees’ fingertips, proverbial walls are broken down across departments, leading to proactive communication and collaboration. Siloed organizations often experience a lack of communication, greater levels of friction, and inefficiencies that are rooted in being removed from sought after resources; democratization of data eliminates these barriers and allows for increased visibility and actionable items.

Democratization also enables data mesh and other advanced data architectures. Data mesh and similar architectures support enterprise-wide access to data and ensures its literacy. This is achieved through thoughtful development followed by widespread distribution, which in turn promotes accessibility for individuals and teams seeking the relevant data. These data practices and structures assist organizations in evolving from having blind and inefficient data capabilities to facilitating greater visibility and clarity, resulting in greater potential for value and efficiency.

Resilient & Compliant Data Policies

Data Governance 1.0 grew out of the need to remain in regulatory compliance and adhere to corporate governance policies. These guardrails remain integral to mitigating risk and the specter of financial or reputational harm and should not be compromised as organizations transition to Data Governance 2.0.

The shift in data culture that coincides with the transition to Data Governance 2.0 crystalizes a collective vision for data’s role in an organization. This allows teams to operate around that vision and follow practices and policies that support its success. The fundamental mission of Data Governance 2.0 is to enable productivity and resilience while driving value, and while Data Governance 1.0’s compliance and governance best practices are not mutually exclusive from Data Governance 2.0’s, they could prohibit permissions and actions that help accomplish these goals.

Data Governance 2.0’s practices would bring together compliance, legal teams, data owners, and stewards while providing the flexibility to create organizational policies that provide greater visibility into data, open more opportunities to leverage data, and ultimately generate value through data without risking unintended breaches or missteps. This collaboration is vital to empowering teams and ensuring that they have the governed and actionable data at their fingertips. People, processes, and technology will become more productive and resilient to disruptions, both internally and externally when Data Governance 2.0’s policies and best practices are meaningfully adopted.

Tying Data to Value

Quality data tells a story. Parsing data and deriving its meaning and significance allows data to show what’s going on “under the hood” and become actionable to generate value. Data Governance 2.0 is grounded in this principle; it transcends the traditional data dashboard, prominent in Data Governance 1.0, reflecting completeness, accuracy, and other standard metrics to emphasize data’s validity and capability to be leveraged.

This is imperative because valid, actionable data empowers teams to perform analyses and zero in on the appropriate set of data that is most meaningful for the business. Take a set of data that represents the number of customers who have ordered a product from a business over its lifespan. For many businesses, this would be a huge sea of fish with the same characteristics. However, if a validity and usability focus was placed on data, the number of loyal customers (repeat buyers or large spenders), for example, could be determined — rendering that set of data actionable. Teams would be able to enhance customer service to those select customers, run targeted advertising campaigns to them, and perform other activities that drive value.

The story that data tells lies in an organization’s ability to define the metrics that are conducive to uncovering valuable insights that teams can run with to generate value.

Today’s leading organizations are data driven. Data having a seat at the table and eliminating much of the guesswork is unleashing businesses’ potential and transforming them into hyper-efficient operations. Adopting Data Governance 2.0 principles allows organizations to treat data as an asset that, when tapped, generates value and makes employees better at their day-to-day tasks. The shift must be a deliberate one — one that outlines a concept for how data is viewed and rallies teams behind one collective vision.