The role of data in the 21st century

- Let's think about the role of data in the 21st century. These days, we hear a
lot about data. We know that our increasingly connected, and digital world, is
producing an abundance of data.How much? Let me give you an
example. Think about digital pictures, it's estimated we're taking and storing
conservatively, around one trillion pictures a year. If every one of those pictures
were printed on 4 X 6 paper, and then lined up end to end, they would easily
reach the sun and back.
I think you'll agree, that's a lot of data. Data alone, might not be that exciting. But
what it can enable, and the answers it can provide, are important. Data is now
vital to our organizations. To our society, and ultimately to each of us. Let me
give you some examples. Today, data is helping the medical community
develop better disease treatment than ever before, by using large volumes of
disease insight, to build better predictive models, for individual patients.
These techniques already help some hospitals determine when to discharge a
patient, in order to lower the possibility of readmission. It's helping to predict
and manage natural disasters, by using social media analytics, of reported
events, to build visualizations of say, the status of a growing flood. We are able
to see on a website, in real time, how the flood is progressing, by using
hundreds, and even thousands of issues, reported by people on social media.
Data is shining a light in corruption, and assisting with prevention of fraud, by
aggregating disparate data sources to detect patterns that suggest unusual
behavior. In the case of credit card usage, a pattern of unusual purchases,
combined with locations and frequency, can quickly raise a red flag, and
suggest a credit card number, is being used fraudulently. With data, we're
beginning to build better cities for each of us. And everyday, it's helping our
organizationsbe more successful by, for example, helping identify and target
new customers.
We can do this by using data analytics, to understand what people are
searching for on-line.And then use new techniques, and tools to offer targeted
ads. Fundamentally data helps us to make more informed decisions. Data must
be viewed and used as an essential instrument of the 21st century. No matter
who you are, you're either producing it, consuming it, or leveraging it. And it's
likely you're doing all three.

To realize the clear benefits of data, we need good quality data. We need data
that is accurate, managed, and properly maintained. We need to know where
data is, who owns it, whether it's kept current, and how to store it properly for
later use. We also need the tools, and skills to work with this data. If we do
these things right, the value of all this data will increase, and be much more
useful in the years ahead.

It's gonna help us solve some of the most intractable challenges we face. This
is the promise, and this is the value of data.

Data governance definition and basics

- Data is important to our organizations. For example, let's agree that sales
data is vital in a for-profit business including who buys your products and
services, when they buy them, how often, and where. Without this data, an
organization is blind to market behavior. It won't have the necessary
information to upsell or to find new customers. If we run a health care
organization, important data include health outcomes and costs. If we produce
a smartphone app, we have to think of data sets that include information about
how many people are using this app, what they like about it, and are we
charging the right price.
When we handle sensitive data, what are the regulatory and legal
requirements? Using data to inform our organizational decision-making is
called data management or information management. These terms can be
used interchangeably. In this course we'll use data management. Simply put,
to some degree all organizations take advantage of data
management. However, we must ask ourselves if we understand and manage
our data correctly, and if we are getting the most value from it.
Every organization falls somewhere along a continuum where weak data
management is on one end and high-performance data management is on the
other. Where your data management performance falls is in how well you
govern the management of data. In trying to achieve high performance in
managing our organizational data, we must ask whether there are agreed
policies and processes, accountabilities, formal decision structures, and
enforcement rules in that management.

The implementation of these types of qualities is called data governance. At a

high level we'll define data governance as data that is managed well. This
definition also helps us to clarify that data management and data
governance are not the same thing. Managing data is concerned with the use
of data to make good business decisions and ultimately run organizations. Data
governance is concerned with the degree to which we use disciplined
behavior across our entire organization in how we manage that data.

It's an important distinction. So what's the bottom line? Most organizations

manage data, but far fewer govern those management techniques well.

The principles of data governance

- As this is an introductory course, we won't cover every possible principle of

data governance.Rather, I'd like to describe a small group of the main
principles. By principles, we mean the foundational concepts of data
governance. They are transparency, accountability and standardization. Let's
begin with the principle of transparency. As the word suggests, in
transparency, everyone within an organization and those who interact with the
organization from the outside should be able to clearly understand and be
advised in a timely manner of the processes and impacts of data governance.
Transparency is essential to avoid surprises, to gain buy-in from all those
impacted people and to build trust in the organization. Transparency should
include being clear on why things are being done and the value of those
actions. Data governance is a positive topic and that means we want to be open
and clear about it throughout the life cycle of data management. As an
example, an organization should have an information security policy that clearly
states what kind of data must never be store or displayed on a public website.
This could include data on employees' birth dates or home addresses. The
second principle is accountability which encompasses the responsibilities of
anyone who has a role to play regarding data in an organization. We'll identify
some of those people later in the course. For now, all we need to do is
acknowledge that if a person has a role to play in data governance, it should be
fully described, understood and agreed upon by all involved parties.
Within a mature data governance environment, we will hold people
accountable for taking specific actions at specific times. As an example, if your
role requires you to disclose what stocks you hold and to enter that data by a
certain date, not adhering to this requirement could result in termination of your
employment. The third principle is standardization, one of my favorites. With
standardization of data, we are concerned with such things as how data is
labeled, described and categorized.
An example of data standardization is how we might handle US state
designations in an organization. When we capture California, is our standard to
use CA or to spell out the entire state name. This can be a really big deal,
why? Well, for one thing, if you wanted to do a search for all data that includes
information in California, a lack of a standard will result in incomplete
results. That is, if you search for CA only, you may not get the results for the
full word California.
Done right, standardization solves many challenges. Standardization improves
quality of data,makes it more usable across systems and, subsequently, makes
it more valuable. What all these core data governance principles have in
common is that they support data quality which is a central goal of data
governance.

Data governance focus areas

- You may be concerned that some of what you've already learned about data
governance sounds like or overlaps with other processes in your
organization. Let's recognize that. The previous video discussed some broad
foundational principles of data governance. Now let's drill down further into
specific, core focus areas. For this I will address policy, quality,compliance,
and business intelligence. Policy is likely the area that you think most
about when you consider data governance.
In data governance, we define policy as a set of guidelines that are enforced
by a governing body to achieve goals. Alone, that sounds like a definition of
data governance, but we do want better data management, so we need these
guidelines. So if we're going to have good data governance, we'll need to
focus on policy. Each organization will need to define their data governance
policies, since they must reflect organizational goals and its culture and
needs.What does data quality deal with? We answer this by asking whether
we have confidence in the integrity of data.
Does the data give us enough confidence to plan, make a decision, or run our
operations? The degree of our confidence directly aligns with quality. In other
words, high confidence equates to high quality data. Next, let's take a look at
compliance. What is compliance as it relates to data?This is the hard work in
ensuring that our data is handled in a way that it meets organizational policies
and rules. There are industry rules and regulations, as well as local, state,
federal, and international regulations and laws to consider.
There may be thousands of rules to follow, and it would largely depend on
your industry and organization. If you're in industries such as
healthcare, banking, and insurance, data handling regulations are
robust. These regulations might include how long data must be stored, who is
allowed to access it, and what reports must be generated and provided to
regulatory agencies.If you're in government, there are laws for data
access such as the Freedom of Information Act,which clearly describes the
responsibilities of certain government agencies to provide access to stored
data when requested.
Internally, you'll likely have rules on what data can be shared and with
whom. Ensuring and enforcing that your organization is in compliance and risk
is managed is a core focus of data governance. Finally, let's briefly touch on
business intelligence. It's a fairly recent term that covers a range of
functions. With business intelligence, we're talking about how we discover and
manage insights in the data we collect and store. It's about using tools and
processes to explore data, understand it better, and report in it.
Business intelligence can help sales teams know what products are selling,
where they're selling, and who's buying their products. We want data
governance to provide a lot of value,and to the extent it supports business
intelligence efforts, such as role access for example, who can create, read,
update and delete data, And decision rights, such as who can decide what
data is collected and shared, it's a sensible focus area. In your organization,
you may choose to focus on just one of these areas, or multiple areas, or all
of them.
This is something you'll address when you begin to create your data
governance strategy.
When does an organization need data governance?

- So far we've discussed the background and motivation for data governance,
some of its principles, and several of its core focus areas. What we haven't
yet touched on is how you determine whether your organization needs data
governance. Answering this question relies heavily on your organization's
assessment of the degree in which it considers data to be a valuable
asset. Put another way, how important is data right now to the success of the
organization? I'll propose two lenses in which to explore this
question, competitive advantage and compliance.
Let's first look at competitive advantage. For many organizations managing
data is simply a function of being in existence. Every organization collects
data and uses it in some form. We have lists of customers and members, we
keep inventory data and updated price lists. It's just the basic foundation of
operations in the 21st century. Depending on what your organization does
though some of that data may provide a competitive advantage.
That is, by leveraging the insights in the data you collect, you may have
access to valuable and unique knowledge that can be used to win in the
marketplace. If this is the case and it does depend on the volume and
diversity of data managed, then you're a likely strong candidate for data
governance. The other lens to look through to determine applicability for a
data governance program is compliance. Sure, it's not exactly the most
glamorous or exciting work,but data compliance is a serious component of
running an organization today.
For example, not meeting certain compliance requirements can have far-
reaching legal consequences for organizations and for individuals. If your
organization is subject to rigorous requirements for mandatory data
handling, you should be looking at data governance. By its definition,
information and data compliance requires certain practices such as
management oversight, risk management, accountability, timeliness, and
enforcement. These areas define the role of data governance.
In summary, an organization must ask itself whether it wants or needs to
leverage data as an asset. It must also determine whether evaluating the
effectiveness of its data management processes is important. Some
organizations will continue to exist without formal governance.Formal is the
important word here because there's always some oversight in data, but it
may not reach the level of a formal approach. A new business, for example,
will be focused on immediate needs like product development and
recruitment, and have little time or resources to dedicate to good data
management.
That said, it will still want to use data to report to investors, and use data to
grow the organization. Data governance can sometimes be defined by the
level of maturity dedicated to data management. Finally if the organization has
compliance responsibilities, data governance is the best way to reduce the
risks associated with the challenges of becoming and staying compliant.