Having some of your data governance-related activities automated drives strategic decision-making and improves daily operations in the organization. Data governance automation is an incredibly important method for ensuring your organization keeps control over its ever-growing data sources. In this blog post we will discuss the three areas where automation can occur in data governance (processes, monitoring and integration) as well as the importance of human intervention and having a data governance solution in place like the Data Cookbook by IData. Data governance is about helping people and enhancing the organization’s data. Automation of certain data activities helps with this.
Automation Areas
- Automation for Data Governance-related Processes – This includes the handling of requests, issues, and questions as well as assisting the data stewards. Automation will make sure that data-related requests (such as new report, new business glossary entry, new data extraction, etc.) get to the right individuals. Also, data quality issues can also be routed to the person who will investigate the issue for resolution. Questions that will enhance knowledge and improve the data will be sent to those with the answers. And the automatic workflows for each of these will remind the individuals to work on these items as well as inform the requesters of the completion of their request.
- Automation for Monitoring of Data Governance-related Activities and Users – The automatic monitoring should have no time-lags in reporting and not prone to human error and / or misinterpretation. Data governance automation will provide an automatic notification when data policy attributes are not being enforced such as privacy fields. Also, a notification will automatically occur when there is a reference data change that could affect reports. Data quality is monitored according to data quality rules and a data quality issue is automatically created if a rule is not met. This issue is then assigned to a data steward who is notified automatically. And managers are automatically informed when requests are not being responded to in the proper time frame.
- Automation for Data Governance-related Integration – This includes automated content synchronization and the ability to import information. You want to automatically map the data items in your database, and establish the metadata across all sources that is most valuable for insight. This allows the organization to have collaborative discussions between team members. Do not use manual entry when you can automatically import business definitions and data models into the data governance solution. Save time and mistakes when using automation over manual entry.
Human Involvement Still Necessary
But you still need human intervention and data stewardship in place for data governance success. Automation of certain data governance activities make it easier for people to execute the data governance responsibilities, rather than removing them of all responsibility for it. Recognize that automation is never going to be a replacement for experience and knowledge of staff members. Their knowledge not only enhances what data governance, and its automation, can provide, but it also helps in fleshing out undiscovered details associated with data assets such as necessary definitions or the enhancement of report specifications.
Importance of Solution for Automation
A solution like the Data Cookbook by IData is necessary for data governance automation. The data governance solution must have the monitoring, integration and processes capabilities mentioned previously.
In conclusion, to fully realize the advantages of data governance and data intelligence you must put in place as much automated data governance as possible. Without this automation, the data governance administration load on the organization will be great and affect the effectiveness of the data governance effort. Being able to account for all the organization’s data as well as resolve disparity in data sources and silos using manual approaches is wishful thinking. Hope that this blog post was beneficial to you.
IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, data intelligence, data stewardship and data quality initiatives. IData also has experts that can assist with data governance, reporting, integration and other technology services on an as needed basis. Feel free to contact us and let us know how we can assist.
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