Driving Action with Data Doesn't Have To Be So Hard

[jrineakter]

Driving Action with Data Doesn't Have To Be So Hard.
The quantity of data being created around the world is mind boggling. According to our friends at Domo, humans currently produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. (And that figure has surely grown since their report was released in 2018.)

In the business world, the companies who first recognized the advantage gained by collecting and analyzing this explosion of data leapt ahead of the competition. Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Facebook, Google… by making business decisions informed by knowledge gleaned from their mass quantities of data, they’ve disrupted and redefined each of their respective industries.

The idea is simple: Collecting and analyzing data, and making decisions based on that knowledge provides the fastest route to success.

But even if you fully grasp the idea of bringing data together and data-driven decision making, many companies still struggle with how best to empower their workers to access, understand, and take action on the mass quantities of data available to them.

The Top-Down Data Governance Mistake
At the beginning of the data explosion, businesses put the care of and responsibility for data governance into the hands of a select few, usually highly specialized data engineers cambodia whatsapp number data and analysts, assuming that their expertise made them ideally suited to “holding the data keys.” At first glance, this seems to make sense — putting the responsibility for establishing and enforcing data governance principles on a handful of senior-level employees. But it didn’t take long for the drawbacks of this approach to become evident.

Front-line data employees felt excluded from the process, and without their input, leadership — often several steps removed from the data itself — enacted policies that didn’t work for on-the-ground data teams. And because keys to the data were only entrusted with a few “data experts,” those experts quickly became a bottleneck trying to accommodate countless requests from colleagues hoping to get their hands on the data they needed to answer pressing business questions.

While well-intentioned, top-down data governance resulted in overly-complex, rigid processes that benefited a few… while making the vast majority of data-hungry workers less productive.