Data democracy – a balancing act made simple
In the past, you may have had trouble getting access to your company’s data. Your IT team were the gatekeepers, and you might find it difficult to get access unless you bribed them with coffee or cakes. This meant that if you needed to use your organisation’s data to get something done, it could take a long time and you’d probably be unfamiliar with the system.
But things have undergone a change and one of the buzzwords in BI and data is “democracy”, which is exactly what it sounds like: empowering more people to access more data. This comes with its risks, and data democracy must be done in the right way. But, if you find the balance, you can benefit from better team agility, efficiency, decision making, and shared insight into your business.
Let’s look at the best way to make data more available in your organisation while managing the number one risk.
Integrity and security
While increased access is all well and good, the reasons why the old system was in place still exist: access needs to be controlled to preserve the integrity of your data and to protect your business interests.
If more people have access to your operational data, then the risk of something going wrong increases. It’s that simple.
For example, if a flaw is introduced into your dataset, then its usefulness shrinks to almost zero. If your data contains mistakes, using it to make any decisions is just taking a shot in the dark. If the data becomes corrupted, then its usefulness isn’t just diminished, it’s deleted.
Equally, much of the data your organisation holds is sensitive. It contains information about your organisational operations and your customers. From a business perspective, if the security of your data was compromised, this could be something your competitors could exploit. It could also severely impact your company’s reputation – in an era of social media, this can quickly gain traction and impact businesses of any size.
But data democratisation is a buzzword for a reason. There are real benefits it can bring, and finding the balance is key.
Delivering democracy, the right way
The solution to finding the balance lies in cloud-based data warehouses combined with self-service analytics and dashboards – again, it’s that simple.
A cloud-based data warehouse will breakdown the siloes separating your data, which will naturally give people access to more. Sales, operations, marketing, and external data can be pooled together to create a single source of truth that people across your company can draw from. At the same time, access can still be managed by a core team who can audit the data, and cloud-level security can add the extra protection.
We did just this for one of our clients, G’s Fresh. It needed a cloud-based data warehouse that took in data from every part of its enterprise. Its order processing and sales data had to be located alongside its wealth of IoT data – think weather sensors, agricultural machinery, and even field-scanning drones. Once complete, employees across the organisation had better access to more of its data.
Alongside this, self-service analytics and visualisation will allow less data-literate team members to access your data. Half of the data democracy battle is finding a way to empower more people with the ability to understand, analyse, and get actionable insights from your data – and this is the half untouched by the old reasons for controlling access. Presenting your data in a visual format is the easiest way to do this, your employees can see and understand business critical information at a glance, without knowing anything about database management, querying, or coding.
Building self-service analytics also lets people query your data under their own steam, giving them a further level of insight of their own. This is what we did for Bistrot Pierre whose managers wanted to query information like specific dish sales, how well its loyalty scheme was performing and location specific volume and revenue. This gave the managers – who may have been more familiar with Consommé than code – heaps more insight into their business’s data.
We can help you democratise your data to give greater visibility across your businesses, and enable more of your team to make better, faster, and more insightful decisions. Get in touch to learn more.
