Reading, analyzing, interpreting, and gaining insights from data is crucial for every business. And almost every stakeholder involved needs to understand it to better assess and rethink and reevaluate their processes. Now, this need to process data has led to data democratization so that even the non-technical teams find it easy to interpret the same.
What is Data democratization?
Data democratization simply means making data accessible to everyone involved in the business. This also means that there are no owners of data who keep it out of reach for others. It paves way for a more transparent and accessible approach. This is important at an organization level so that every team understands data and identifies the issues and solutions thereby. The sole aim of data democratization is to give access to individuals for a better understanding and decision making.
Until now, data was usually owned by specific teams such as marketing, business, or IT. Some organizations still want the status quo to remain. Data is sacrosanct. And there are concerns about whether it should be made available for everyone to anyone. Some companies’ concerns go as far as the data being misread, misinterpreted or even misused.
Besides, there’s always a risk if you give access to data to more and more individuals. Can you trust everyone who’s reading data most important to your company? What about data integrity? But then again some businesses want to democratize data for their employees for better reasons.
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Why do you need Data democratization?
Ever heard of the term big data? Data democratization makes it easy to process that very big data for people who don’t have technical know-how yet want to interpret data to push their efforts in achieving better results. One of the common ways to do this is by using data virtualization software which retrieves and manipulates data without going through the technical details of it. This helps individuals read data without having to change file formats or even fixing the inconsistencies in data.
Among the best ways of how companies are democratizing data today is through cloud storage. Clouds are known to give you the encrypted security that prevents any security threat to your data. Another way is to use self-service BI applications which make it easy for non-technical departments to understand data analysis with more efficiency.
How to get started with Data democratization?
Here are a few ways of how you can democratize data for your employees.
Know your business: Self-awareness is the first step in self-development. And that holds true even for businesses. Organizations have to know themselves first with a clearly defined vision and goals and how to achieve those. To this end, companies must be aware of the progress in every department and what is lacking where. This leads to the creation of crucial data such as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to assess and track the performance of every team and individual. When this data is made available to your employees, they are in a better position to identify any leaks, challenges, or scope of improvement in their respective tasks.
Clear and concise data: The very goal of data democratization is that it should be easily understood by everyone. If the data is not organized in a clear and precise manner, then the very purpose of democratizing it is defeated. Unclear information will lead to misleading analysis and subsequently bad decision making. That’s why as an organization you need to clean and model data before associating it with analytics. For this, you will have to decide on the information that will be utilized throughout the company.
Training is needed: Before you involve the user in utilizing the data you need to make sure that the importance and the processes are well understood by them. This can be made possible if companies invest in training the individuals to interpret data accurately so that they can explore it and decipher information in the best possible way.
Deploy Machine Learning: Because of the recent advancements in AI and ML analyzing data is now easier than ever. If you pose a query it will show results on multiple related queries. This helps the individuals even when they miss out on some important step or information they want to seek.
Also Read: What is Threat Modeling and its role in developing secure systems?
Conclusion
If you are one of those organizations that want to democratize data, then you need to have strong governance to make sure that data is utilized properly and is managed well. You need to impart training to individuals, especially the non-technical teams on how to interpret data the way it’s supposed to be read. If handled well, data democratization can help you and your employees in making your brand successful. To know more, explore Daffodil's end-to-end data management services.