“Organizations do really need to expand access to a broader range of employees, [because] data is the asset that can separate the winners from the losers.” – mentions Lori Sherer, leader of advanced analytics and digital practices, Bain & Company Inc.
Clearly, the level of data democratization now will decide a business’s success in the future. Let’s delve deeper into this topic.
What is Data Democratization?
Data democratization means availing data to everyone in an organization based on their roles. Not limited to only data access, data democratization avails data to everyone irrespective of their technical skillsets, which helps them understand data well and make decisions based on insights.
In crux, data democratization is:
- Availing data to all employees without the need for technical know-how,
- That helps them ask the right questions and make decisions,
- By availing them of the right tools and removing the dependency on IT experts,
- And introduce a data-driven culture and the required changes,
- As a continuous process, not some one-off event.
Why is Data Democratization Important in Current Times?
While the work culture has shifted to working from home, employees now work on the personal network and not office networks. Not only this setup calls for security revamping on devices, but employees also have to take care of many responsibilities on their own without dependencies on IT staff. So, data democratization is essential for the following reasons.
· The Dearth of Data Scientists
With organizations relying and investing heavily on data, the looming shortage of data scientists has increased. Data democratization offers the right opportunities to citizen data professionals.
· Insights for Employees at all Levels
Having easy access to data means managers can track initiatives, innovate better, execute their jobs efficiently with lesser dependencies, and cut bottlenecks.
The same is correct for employees at various levels to become self-sufficient. Access, understand and utilize data on their own without assistance.
· Promote Diversity and Inclusion
Another reason to have transparency in data is to allow diversity and inclusion effectively. This helps managers and HR people make better decisions and plan strategies to address gender pay gaps, rule out various diversity-related biases, and promote inclusion.
· Facilitates Real-Time Decisions
Employees face a delay due to dependency on the data experts. If employees have access to historical data, they can help customers make better decisions.
For instance, warehouse employees can manage shipment dispatch better if they have access to data. This helps them to make quick decisions without consulting the warehouse manager for trivial issues.
· Drives Employee and Customer Experience
Making data democratic in a company means improved employee experience. Data access makes employees feel more secured, inclusive and empowered to make quicker decisions. And ultimately, enhances the customer experience. And 80% of buyers still stress on a good experience.
How to Democratize Data in Your Company?
When you plan to democratize data in your organization, you need to take care of these processes to make data available for all:
· Collect Data
Collecting data from disparate systems is a key to make data available for all. Transactional, operational, and historical data, structured and unstructured content—all sorts of data should be collected and integrated into one enterprise-wide system.
Data collection includes ingestion and integration. Azure Data Factory by Microsoft is a leading market tool for data integration that is crucial in data democratization.
The collection leads to the centralization of data.
· Centralize Data
Dispersed data in various data marts is a hurdle for innovations and creates a bottleneck in terms of time, accuracy, and ease of consolidating data. Not to forget the price attached with it.
76% of CFOs believe in having one version of the truth to meet organizational objectives.
Rather than storing data in siloes, centralizing the data over a cloud—mixed, hybrid, or others—is the most intelligent way to bring enterprise data under one roof. This also leads to sharing data with easy reporting and presentation.
· Share Data
Your customers and employees—data consumers—should be able to access, understand, and use data for decision-making without any assistance from data experts. Hence, sharing data is a crucial step in data democratization.
As mentioned earlier, this also increases experience for them. Microsoft Power BI is a powerful visualization tool to share data.
· Govern Data
Secure the data to be accessed only by authorized access, considering all the regulations in mind. With security policies like HIPPA and GDPR, you need to sensitize people to use the data correctly and access it responsibly.
Data governance also includes tagging the data in a data dictionary. This ensures the knowledge of data lineage and authenticity. And makes data searchable, which is a crucial step for availing data to employees and end-users.
Let’s talk today about data democratization with Microsoft’s Azure Data Factory (ADF).
How Can ADF Help in Data Democratization?
Quite often, your source system is more than one. Usually, your incoming data is diverse in variety and size. The complexity increases with the velocity of data. And you can’t expect to have a target system that matches your sources. In between involved are data cleansing, profiling, and integration.
In such situations, cloud-based ADF helps you collect and integrate data in a centralized repository and helps in governance.
· Data Orchestration
Nowadays, most companies collect an enormous amount of data. And cloud storage is the most deemed data storage solution for such data.
Cloud-based ADF has pipelines that define a logical grouping of activities related to data. The tool comes with pipelines and a drag-and-drop environment. You can merge data from various platforms and perform a host of cleansing activities.
This enables easy integration of varied data sources and bringing all the valuable data into one platform for the employees and customers.
· Security
ADF, being a cloud-based tool, automatically brings strong security that always concerns data professionals and users.
Being an Azure product, ADF, by default, complies fully with HIPPA and various other regulations and security policies. It can securely combine data from multiple data sources across 25+ global regions. This demolishes the geographical walls for employees accessing data while being connected remotely.
· Code-Free Data Flows
Your citizen data professionals can integrate data with ADF, leaving data scientists to focus on complex tasks. With 90+ readymade data connectors, your citizen integrators can connect and work with data from all sorts of cloud and on-premise databases. Without being an expert in code, they can construct ETL and ETL pipelines without knowing to code.
Such benefits expedite data processing and help people who need finished data sitting at the other end of the country or beyond.
Are You Ready for Data Democratization?
Whether you are a CXO at a start-up or an enterprise, the chances of you having substantial daily data ingestion are high. Hence, you need to implement and manage data democratization efficiently.
We, at Logesys, deal in carious data strategies and activities and help companies manage their data smoothly. Should you have a query in integrating data or intelligently availing data to all, we would look forward to discussing it with you. Please contact us here for a consultation.