Revolution of Data Democratization
Almost all of today’s businesses are based on the speed and efficiency of their employees and their performance. In order to achieve it, the need for approachable data increased significantly.
For the better part of five decades, data was “owned“ by IT departments. While business units such as marketing, business analysts and executives used the data to make business decisions, they also had to go through the IT
department to get the data. Precisely this fact, data democratization can change.
What is date democratization?
Data democratization can be defined as making digital information accessible to the average non-technical user of information systems, without having to require the involvement of IT. It is the foundation for self-service analytics, an approach that allows these less than technical users to gather and analyze data without having to seek help from a data steward, system administrator, or someone in IT.
The goal of data democratization is to allow non-specialists to be able to gather and analyze data without requiring outside help.
Reasons for needing data democratization
The main reason for data democratization is the incredible amount of data created — big data. Also, there are many tech innovations that are helping non-technical people understand the sense of data.
Some of those tech innovations are:
· Data virtualization software
— it retrieves and manipulates data without knowing the technical details about it
— this helps avoid the issue of needing to clean up inconsistencies in data or different file formats
· Data federation software
— this software uses metadata to aggregate data from a variety of sources into a virtual database
· Cloud storage
— is used to avoid the data silos, that prevented data democratization by using cloud storage as a central location to store data
— database management security features encrypt or mask data to heighten security
· Self-service BI applications
— these applications make it easier for non-technical users to interpret data analysis
— now machines look at data and explain it to non-technical users
Pros and coins of data democratization
PROS
· able to distribute information across all working teams to gain a competitive advantage
· the more people with diverse expertise who have the ability to access the data easily and quickly will enable your organization to identify and take action on critical business insights
· when you allow data access to any tier of your company, it empowers individuals at all levels of ownership and responsibility to use the data in their decision making
· stakeholders spend less time churning on analyzing data, and more time on testing theories and implementing optimizations
COINS
· misinterpretation of the data by non-technical employees could occur and these employees could make bad decisions based on their bad interpretation of the data
· the more users who have access to the data the bigger the data security risk and the more challenges to maintaining the data integrity
· some data still exists in silos, this can still make it difficult for people in different departments to access data and view it
· duplication of effort across different teams that could be more costly than a centralized analysis group
· dedicated resources officially responsible for producing high-quality insights generally employ greater scrutiny when making recommendations, often analyzing a problem with multiple data sets and advanced modeling
· tighter controls over potentially risky data including confidential records, profiles, and information that gives the organization a distinct competitive or reputational advantage
· subject matter expertise often leads to data stewardship (i.e., greater accuracy and less susceptibility to multiple incongruent data trends and unexplained inconsistencies)
· business value is easily exhibited for reinvestment in the team
What to do before implementing data democratization?
Even though data democratization is an evolution, any organization who democratizes data needs to have strong governance in place to ensure the data is carefully managed.
Everyone in the organization should be properly training on how to best use the data to drive company initiatives and progress.
Expect that data democratization is an evolution where each individual small win when non-technical users gain insight because of accessing the data adds up to ultimately prove the merits of data democratization.
Data democratization is the future of dealing with big data and knowing its value. Businesses armed with the right tools and understanding are succeeding nowadays because they’re arming all their employees with the knowledge necessary to make clever decisions and offer better customer experiences.
