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 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.
Agile Data Governance Solves the Problems Created by a Top-Down Methodology
In order to derive value from your data, your business needs to make it available and understandable to anyone who wants it to help drive business decisions. It does no good if your workers can’t get their hands on the data when they need it, or receive it without understanding what they’re looking at or where it came from.
Top-down governance kept access and understanding in the hands of a select few. If you want to truly democratize data usage in your organization and make it available to anyone who wants it, a better approach is Agile Data Governance (ADG).
Agile Data Governance adapts the best practices of Agile and Open software development to data and analytics. A modern data governance methodology, ADG succeeds by encouraging data producers and consumers to work together, iteratively capturing knowledge with every project so both can benefit.
This built-in transparency leads to progressively higher data quality as teams refine analysis and data sources one step at a time. Your data becomes available to anyone who wants to work with it, and as teams build data assets together and watch each other solve real business problems, your community of data producers, data consumers, and domain experts within the organization grows in size and in accumulated knowledge.
Eureka™ Sets You Up for an Agile Approach
By now you’re sold on an agile approach to data governance at your organization, and you’re ready to start laying the groundwork right now! But where do you start? And how do you make your data easily available and understandable to everyone?
Eureka™, data.world’s new, innovative suite of catalog capabilities, does exactly that.
Using the power of the knowledge graph, Eureka™ helps every data user at your company — whether they have technical data abilities or not — more effectively and efficiently develop, discover, understand, and use trusted data products.
First, Eureka Automations™ helps your business catalog your data by using a powerful knowledge graph and semantic query engine to automatically discover and catalog relationships between specific pieces of data, stakeholders, and much more — it effectively maps your data for you, right out of the gate. It then allows you to trace and see data provenance with Eureka Explorer™, giving you a birds-eye view of your data flow — where it’s coming from and where it’s going — and building organization-wide confidence in the data you’re using.
And when you’re looking for a specific dataset or answer to a specific business question, Eureka Answers™ finds them for you as easily as if you were typing a search query into Google. It surfaces the most relevant results to get you exactly what you need as soon as you need it, getting you to business value that much faster.
Learn More About How Eureka™ Sets You on a Path to Agile Data Governance
Eureka™ makes it easy to begin and maintain an automated, intelligent, and scalable approach to agile data governance. And it makes it easy for your data workers — with mountains of data at their fingertips — to transform themselves into knowledge superheroes.
