Are you making the most out of your data? For many businesses, there’s plenty of room for improvement. That’s where data governance and data management come in: These processes ensure that businesses collect the highest-quality data possible and manage it effectively.
But which process is most important: Data governance vs. data management? There are pros and cons to each. However, if you carefully consider your options and understand how to use both processes effectively, you’ll improve the quality of your data and set your business up for success.
The Difference Between Data Governance vs. Data Management
Before you decide between data governance vs. data management, you’ll need to consider what each can do for your business.
Data governance is the process of ensuring that your business data is high-quality.
What does it mean for data to be high in quality? It means the data is:
- Accurate
- Consistent
- Easy to read
- Easy to use
- Accessible
- Secure
To determine whether data ticks off all of these boxes, enterprises usually create a special data governance council, including:
- IT experts
- Data analysts
- Upper management
- Other important stakeholders
These council members work together to come up with an effective data governance strategy for the business.
Compared to data governance, data management is much simpler.
Data management is the process of collecting, storing and maintaining data.
It doesn’t account for how high in quality the data is—it’s only concerned with logistics, like how the data is organized.
The differences between data governance vs. data management are significant. One process looks at data from a philosophical standpoint while the other looks at data from a logistical standpoint.
Despite their differences, these two data processes can be especially powerful when used together. Businesses must consider not only how reliable their data is, but they also need to organize it properly. Here’s how to use both of these processes to your advantage:
Why Your Business Needs Data Governance
Data quality matters. You might have thousands of spreadsheets filled with tens of thousands of numbers, but if this data is flawed, it’s essentially worthless. Data governance is the first line of defense against bad data. When you go through this process, you look at your data from every angle and perspective.
Insurance companies rely on demographics, statistical data, and claim history to determine risk. However, if the company’s method for collecting this data is flawed, the company could lose money. Or, if the company is collecting all of the correct data but isn’t making it available to important members of the team, this leads to communication breakdowns.
This is why every business should look at their data from a bird’s-eye view. But how?
One challenge that business owners face is that the data governance process is complicated and time-consuming. You have to:
- Invite members of your team to join the data governance council;
- Set up frequent council meetings;
- Identify weaknesses in your data;
- Come up with specific solutions to address these problems;
- Ensure that you have all of the tools you need;
- Train staff on the new data protocol; and
- Revisit your data strategy to see if your solutions worked.
This is especially difficult if you have little experience with data quality analysis. You and your team may fail to notice flaws in your system.
The best way to use data governance to your advantage is to hire an IT firm to help with the process. IT firms can design a data strategy that is comprehensive, reliable, and scalable. They will:
- Analyze the accuracy of your data;
- Catalog and define all of your data;
- Upload your data to a user-friendly business intelligence portal;
- Give your team members access to this data across platforms and devices;
- Provide visualization tools for your data; and
- Strengthen your data security.
IT firms work closely with your data governance council to find workable solutions. You’ll get feedback from your staff on exactly what they need in order to be successful, and you’ll have a knowledgeable IT team ready to implement the changes immediately.
Combined with an effective data management strategy, this makes your business more efficient—and likely more profitable.
Why Your Business Needs Data Management
Many business owners find that they need a more effective data management system after they improve their data governance. Improving the quality of your data is like buying a brand new car. At first, everything will operate exactly as it should. But eventually, you will need to do some maintenance work to keep it running smoothly.
This is especially true if your data governance strategy requires you to collect more data than you were before. Additional data dramatically improves the accuracy of your predictions, including risk analysis and marketing strategies. However, you need a place to store all of this new data and process it.
Managed IT providers can help you make this important transition. Experienced firms will look carefully at your new data governance strategy and ensure that you have the infrastructure required to support it. Offshore IT departments and cloud storage solutions are especially useful in this case because you won’t have to store the data on-premise or maintain expensive servers. Moreover, IT firms offer 24-hour technical support services if your team runs into any problems or needs help finding a certain data set.
The IT firm takes care of every single management detail for you, including:
- Data architecture;
- Warehousing and storage;
- Analytics software;
- Software patches;
- Technical support;
- Security management; and
- Data recovery.
With these services, you can focus on collecting the highest quality data knowing that it will be stored and maintained properly
How to Use Both Data Governance and Data Management
With help from an IT firm, you’ll get all of the benefits of new data governance and data management systems without making any significant effort or using additional resources. This, in turn, takes pressure off of your existing IT department and staff. You won’t have to decide between data governance vs. data management or compromise due to a lack of time and resources. Experienced IT firms know how to maximize both processes to get the best results.
Now that you understand the differences between data governance vs. data management, it’s time to take action. If you’re ready to make the most out of your data, contact Tek Leaders today. We’ll help you build the best data management and governance strategy based on your unique needs. Or, if you have more questions about this process, you can reach us by email directly.
Shashank Reddy Tummala.
