Benefits of Data Governance: 4 Ways It Helps Build Great Data Teams

Updated April 03rd, 2023

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Around 2016, the modern data stack went mainstream. This refers to a collection of technologies, tools, and capabilities that help businesses today store, manage, and use their data.

These tools are unified by three key ideas:

Self-service data analytics
“Agile” data management
Cloud-first and cloud-native

Even though the modern data stack has made it easier to ingest and transform data, governance has become one of the biggest barriers in the path of true data democratization.

Here, let us explore the importance and benefits of a data governance program in your organization.

Table of contents #

What is data governance?
Why does data governance matter?
How does data governance benefit organizations?
The 4 biggest benefits of data governance
1. Enables true data democratization
2. Builds effective collaboration between teams
3. Protects the integrity and relevance of data
4. Helps comply with data protection laws and regulations
Bottom line on data governance benefits
Related reads on data governance benefits

What is data governance? #

Before diving deeper into the benefits of data governance, let’s have a quick refresher on the concept:

According to Gartner:

“Data governance is the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure the appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, consumption, and control of data and analytics.”

Here’s a simpler way to understand: Data governance is simply about deciding how to decide. It’s a set of policies, processes, and standards to collect, manage, and store data for better decision-making.

Why does data governance matter? #

Why is data governance necessary?

Because it ensures that we act in the best interest of everyone.

Be it regions, countries, businesses, or data - in its essence governance ensures that equitable solutions are met for everyone, and everyone’s rights are upheld.

This is what most of us forget because conventionally data governance comes with the baggage of being seen as strict rules that are dealt top-down with a heavy hand. Something that inherently pronounces control and not a privilege.

Data governance needs to go through a renaissance, it needs a paradigm shift at multiple levels.

Paradigm Shift in Data Governance

Data governance needs a paradigm shift at multiple levels. Image by Atlan

Here’s a great blog that talks about how changing the narrative around data governance will help answer the why(s) of data governance much better, and will get seamless buy-in from everyone in the organization.

Fundamentally, data governance ensures effective collaboration and data democratization.

How does data governance benefit organizations? #

Data governance benefits organizations by ensuring the proper and prompt usage of data throughout the organization.

Here are some examples of how:

Setting standards for data quality — accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and completeness of data assets.
Setting data access control policies and a program for recurrent monitoring of quality, security, and privacy checks.
Helping reduce the risk of major disruptions exposing data.
Defining data retention and data deletion policies.
Enables data assets to be auditable across the entire lifecycle and therefore be in compliance with data protection laws and regulations.
Improves consistency and confidence in risk assessment and business decision-making and thereby maximizing the ROI of your data assets.

Organizations are working with copious amounts of data now. To understand that data, data governance is no longer good to have, it’s a must-have.

But are they really maximizing the true potential of data governance? The real benefits of data governance can truly be unlocked once you understand the genesis of data governance, and what it’s really meant to do.

The 4 biggest benefits of data governance #

Here are the 4 main benefits of data governance.

Enables true data democratization
Builds effective collaboration between teams
Protects the integrity and relevance of data
Helps comply with data protection laws and regulations

Plus effective implementation of data governance will have countless positive impacts on data quality, data analytics, data reports, and data-related decision-making as well.

Let’s understand each data governance benefits in detail, and how they help data teams work better together:

1. Enables true data democratization #

Everyone has a right to data that will help them make better decisions. Data governance ensures that you can uphold that right, without compromising on data security.

With the right modern data governance platforms, you can create granular and customized tag-based access policies.

Examples of tags include business-related metadata, technical metadata, or even security classifications. Such a system also ensures transparency about how decisions are taken regarding which team member has access to certain data and who doesn’t.

Data Governance Benefits #1 - Data democratization

Example of implementing tag-based access policies. Image by Atlan

2. Builds effective collaboration between teams #

Having a clear understanding of who should have access to data and who shouldn’t, also reduces the friction between diverse data practitioners existing in the same or different teams.

For e.g. A person looking at a restricted data asset knows who owns it, and can quickly request access with the click of a button. Also, if a particular data is publicly discoverable, no matter if it’s in a different domain, a data user doesn’t need to wait for days for IT to give them access to that data or for domain experts to relay what that data actually means.

Data Governance Benefits #2 — Social colloboration between data teams

Managing users is easy for Data Stewards, via, group, actions, or even personas. Image by Atlan

3. Protects the integrity and relevance of data #

For data to be the bedrock of impactful decisions it must be relevant, accurate, trustworthy, easy to use, and have high quality.

Data governance ensures that by employing the following:

Tracking and managing all data in an organization with help of data catalogs.
Creating business glossaries for ease of understanding of this data.
Setting up data lineage to enable root-cause analysis and impact analysis.
Management of data access via established and communicated policies.

Data Governance Benefits #3 — Data integrity

Automate lineage via SQL parsing. Image by Atlan

4. Helps comply with data protection laws and regulations #

Last but not the least, the reason why most organizations start thinking about data governance - is to comply with data protection laws and regulations.

Even a minor infringement of GDPR or CCPA regulations can cost an organization a fortune. Good data governance tools and processes ensure automated compliance with such regulations and laws. They create universal guidance for the structured creation, storage, and deletion of data.

## Bottom line on data governance benefits

The benefits of data governance are endless if implemented well. With the rate at which data consumption and usage are exploding around us, organizations will benefit from having data governance at the heart of their data management principles and not as an afterthought or as a part of the checklist.

Ready to make data governance effortless? #

Try Atlan — Deploy best-in-class, catalog, metadata management, and data governance without compromising on data democratization.