Transparency Is The Currency of A Trusted, Governed Data Environment...
"The single most important ingredient in the recipe for success is 'Transparency, because transparency builds trust." — Denise Morrison.
With all the technology and innovations in our Big Data World today, the most prevailing problem plaguing many organizations still remains the lack of trust in our data.
Our problem is no longer in the lack of data. As we now have a huge amount of data in our ecosystems like never before. The burning issue is how to find trusted value in the ocean of data we have in our enterprise.
The effects of inconsistencies, discrepancies, and other data issues can be felt across our data life cycle and ultimately affect the insight and key decisions we make.
We can all agree that the common ground for most of our competing data demands is rooted in transparency.
At the heart of most of our data demands (internal, external, regulatory, etc.) is the need to have trusted data, valuable data. Simply put, the plight of many data-driven organizations today is how to build trust in their data, models, and key decisions.
Most data pains today can be directly or indirectly linked to the issue of lack of trust in our data. i.e., inconsistency, redundancy, and data silos.
Why Data Transparency?
Transparency is the currency of 'Trust'.
The importance of creating transparency around your data journey cannot be over-emphasized for any organization hoping to win and keep winning with their data today. It must find a way to make its data trusted, acceptable, and business ready for the insight to drive value. Trusted data is the most critical fabric of any organization's data culture to succeed in its data demands and innovative initiatives.
This is where data transparency comes into the picture. Data transparency is your anchor for building a trusted data environment. Transparency in your data will win your trust with your data consumers. Transparency around your data value chain will increase your credibility, promote accountability, consistency, and eliminate waste & redundancies.
Simply put, show me a trusted data environment, and I'll show you a winning data-driven and data-led organization going places with their data.
Your data journey cannot be a Blackbox to your consumers. You must be intentional in showing true transparency of the journey of your data from the point of creation, aggregation to the points of consumption.
When consumers have true transparency around the creation of their data and its journey across the different hops, when they understand the different handshakes and established controls along the data journey, they're more likely to trust the usage of the same for business decisions and insightful analytics.
How To Establish Data Transparency In Your Data Environment?
One of the foundational pillars and standards of care for a governed data environment is accountability around data lineage and value chains. This governance pillar is key and critical to establishing needful transparency to start building trust around your data asset.
The following are some of the practical steps for establishing transparency around your data value chains:
1. Identify all key enterprise reporting packages, dashboards, and consuming points in your data environments.
2. Develop Functional Lineage / Data Flow for each reporting package.
3. Map a High-Level view of each report back to their sources of origination and transformation.
4. Review the journey with stakeholders and verify that the journey is correct and valid.
5. Identify data ownership and accountability across the value chain.
6. Highlight type of data movement (Manual v Automated Move) between each hop & handshake.
7. Identify Data Producers and Consumers along the value chain.
8. Highlight the existence of controls along the value chain.
9. Highlight control gaps, shortcuts, and strength of available controls along the value chain.
10. Certify 'As Is' Lineage & Control Inventory to kick off quality issues remediation plan conversation.
In a nutshell, your data consumers need to trust your data health for them to use with confidence. Addressing the lack of trust in your data environment with your governance standards of care will provide an accelerated win-win for you to actualize needful transparency for a trusted data environment effectively.
It will help build and drive trust as an integral fabric of your enterprise data culture to actualize exceptional customer experience, improve operations, ensure compliance, and drive innovation.
Need help creating a win-win with your data governance adoption to drive transparency and trust?
Book a free call with me to discuss your current challenge and engage via my profile link in the featured section or https://calendly.com/lara-gureje/30min