Data Intelligence is the Future of Data Governance
Data-driven decisions and insights: This is what businesses have aspired to for 10 years or more. It’s hard to read an annual report that doesn’t mention it. Entire professions have grown up around it— the Chief Data Office being a prime example. So why do we feel like we are falling behind in that journey?
According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, fewer individuals—a mere 24 percent to be exact—would rate their organizations as being data-driven. That’s down from 38 percent before the pandemic started. With more and more organizations transforming to digital processes, why is it that fewer individuals at those businesses report that they’ve felt the value of being a data-driven organization?
Data Governance Is Key to Being Data-Driven
I believe that the answer is simple and comes down to knowing where the right data is located, being able to understand it, being able to trust it, and being able to get access to it. As more data is created, and more cloud applications are spun up, more data and more silos emerge—leading to people feeling they are less ‘data driven’. Thankfully, there is a modern solution to this problem, and it lies with a rather mature concept in data: governance.
The Evolution of Data Governance: From Compliance to Data Intelligence
You may wonder how data governance can solve this challenge. Many people associate data governance with its roots in regulatory compliance. Traditionally, governance has emphasized deep understanding of a narrow set of data assets and tight access controls before sharing that data. Data intelligence starts from the opposite point of view—sharing the data.
By definition, data intelligence starts from a broader spectrum of data—often “all” available data in the enterprise, or at least what is in the data lake, cloud data warehouse, and enterprise systems—that could be useful to any analyst, data scientist or decision maker. Who needs data and for what purpose, where does that data reside, and what controls need to be placed on the data before sharing it? But data intelligence is still grounded in the key principles of governance, that is, who is allowed to use the data and for what purpose? Really, data intelligence is the logical evolution of governance as data becomes democratized and shared freely—and safely—across the enterprise and beyond.
What is 'data intelligence, you ask? Well, if you ask our good friend Stewart Bond at IDC, he’d tell you that, “Data intelligence leverages business, technical, relational, and operational metadata to provide transparency of data profiles, classification, quality, location, lineage, and context; Enabling people, processes and technology with trustworthy and reliable data.”
Simply put, data intelligence helps you to find your data, understand it, trust it, and access it. Sounds familiar, right? Context is intelligence. It’s understanding the context in which data is being used: for example, in order to make intelligent recommendations to users such as data scientists, data intelligence starts by governing analytic models and providing the context of associated data sets to train and feed those models.
The Future of Data Governance: 2022 and Beyond
Transforming data governance programs for teams who can deliver intelligence about your data in 2022 and beyond is your challenge. But it’s a challenge worth embarking upon—and we’re here to help. Not just as a technology that supports your mission, but also as trusted advisors who can help connect you with a collective community of experts to assist you on your journey.
On August 4, at our first-ever Cloud Data Intelligence Summit, we’ll bring together data leaders from organizations such as Franciscan Alliance and McGraw-Hill Education to share their insights. We’ll feature Hyoun Park from Amalgam Insights to share how data intelligence improves AI. We’ll share our thoughts on the state of the market. And most importantly, we’ll introduce you to the new Cloud Data Governance and Catalog.
What Is Cloud Data Governance and Catalog?
During the upcoming Cloud Data Intelligence Summit, we’ll showcase the newest offering from Informatica: Cloud Data Governance and Catalog. This cloud-native, holistic solution to data and analytics governance brings together capabilities across cataloging, lineage, stewardship, quality, AI model governance, and more to help you find, understand, trust, and access your data.
We will share how this new technology can help you advance from data governance to delivering data intelligence to your organization. We’ll cover how you can fuel deeper insights with trusted data at the center. I hope that you’ll take a moment and join us—and in the meantime, please check out this brief promotional video as a primer to the event. I look forward to seeing you there.
