Delivering business value by establishing data excellence

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27 November 2023

Establishing data excellence is a challenge every organization has to tackle. Exploding data volumes, multiplying an uncertain economic landscape data sources, and evolving and expanding government regulations have made achieving control and compliance more difficult than ever, but its importance cannot be overstated.

Particularly in times of economic uncertainty, companies must have access to data to meet their business goals and come out ahead. Providing everyone in the organization with the data they need to make better decisions is seemingly at odds with ensuring all that data is controlled and its quality ensured. Uncontrolled, noncompliant data can wreak havoc on organizations in multiple ways. In the event of a data breach, 62% of customers blame the company first, rather than the hacker. And regulatory fines continue to skyrocket – in 2020, GDPR fines increased by 40% compared to the previous 20 months. But despite these known costs, 80% of organizations provide more access privileges than are necessary for users to do their jobs.

Now more than ever, businesses need to strike a balance between agility and control. With Talend and Pomerol Partners ensuring secure access and visibility across the data lifecycle, organizations can focus on using data to meet the challenges of staying relevant and competitive rather than struggling to find it or questioning its credibility. By putting the right data excellence strategy in place, businesses will immediately see tangible results and better business outcomes.

Best practices for building a strategy for data excellence

There are three key areas that an organization’s data excellence strategy should address.

First, the organization must deliver data trust and confidence. Without trusted data, business leaders can’t be sure of insights they get from their data are even true, and are forced to rely on their gut to make critical decisions. To achieve trust and confidence, organizations should focus on:

  1. Embedding data quality and transformation components throughout their data pipelines, making it easy to standardize and consistently deliver accurate and complete data
  2. Categorizing and documenting data with a business glossary to establish a common language for data throughout the organization
  3. Measuring and tracking data quality throughout the data lifecycle
  4. Establishing metadata-driven profiling to provide data discovery through applications and systems across the enterprise

Second, the organization must be able to enforce internal data policies. Giving the right people and systems access to the right data only gets more challenging as data volumes multiply and data environments grow more complex. Fortunately, modern data solutions can help organizations get this data back under control with capabilities such as:

Rules creation and assignment to ensure no data goes unprotected

-Advanced workflow automation capabilities across all datasets to monitor and govern data sharing while ensuring the right level of data access

-Master data management and stewardship activities to prevent data errors and misuse

-Full observability across data and publishing to provide transparency that data is being used safely and according to internal policies

Finally, the organization needs to comply with external regulations. The right data excellence strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate new and evolving regulations, yet minimize the time and money spent to maintain ongoing compliance. This can best be achieved through:

-Data masking and obfuscation components to anonymize sensitive information and ensure data privacy

-Data tracking and lineage across all disparate data assets to establish a robust data record with information on origins, movement, and transformation

-Real-time detection and ability to remove personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI), which ensures compliance with regulations regarding the right to be forgotten, right of accessibility, and right of rectification for customers

The results of an effective data excellence strategy

With the right data excellence strategy in place, organizations can see immediate improvements to their data health and positive impacts across the business, including:

Mitigating their risk of non-compliance, reducing the risk of regulatory fines and data breaches that erode customer trust

Increasing data team productivity by simplifying and automating data processes, so data professionals can spend less time managing data tools and more time creating data products

Improving business agility by making it easier to democratize and share ever-increasing amounts of data between growing numbers of users users in a controlled environment

A force multiplier for better data health

Establishing data excellence by improving data quality, control, and compliance should not make working with data harder or more time- consuming. Instead, it should enable data professionals to manage every step of the data lifecycle faster and easier – especially as data volumes, users, and requests continue to grow.

Establishing this level of control over organizational data will support a healthier data environment – one where data is easily discoverable, understandable, and of value to the people who need to use it. The Talend and Pomerol Partners alliance allows organizations to get more value out of their data by helping them:

Deliver data trust and confidence with capabilities such as data integration, quality rules, stewardship, preparation, and more with a global team of highly skilled, dedicated consultants

Enforce internal data policies with capabilities such as cataloging, policy management, and workflows

Comply with external regulations with critical capabilities such as masking, obfuscation, lineage tracking, data glossary, data privacy, and more

Pomerol Partners creates and delivers meaningful, business-focused data solutions. We are not general technologists; we specialize in data and data-driven projects. Our team of consultants and data engineers have a depth of experience across the full analytics supply chain – from initial data extract, through transformation and modelling, to dashboarding and operational alerting, and, onward to machine learning and predictive analytics. We also integrate data into customer facing portals. We work in a wide range of industries across a wide range of business functions including sales, operations, finance, manufacturing, marketing, and, more. Our clients include the Fortune 100 to 100 employee companies. Our consultants are in the United States, United Kingdom, and Portugal.

Talend provides a unified end-to-end solution that allows Pomerol clients to do all of this and more. You can start with a tightly defined project and build more capability over time with products and services as needed. We also like that Talend also makes it easy to achieve cross- functional collaboration by removing the barriers for different people and roles with different skill sets to work together on a single, common platform.

#Data Excellence #Data Quality #PHI #PII #Qlik #Talend

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