What if we lived in a world where universal access to data could be used to transform, enrich and massively boost companies by unleashing the inherent value of information? The information traditionally locked in data stores that is only accessible to a select few.
Data democratisation is the idea that data can and should be available for use at any time to identify new opportunities, create revenue streams and augment business growth.
Basically – are the right people accessing the right data at the right time? Or is it locked behind red-tape and meaningless job titles?
Truly understanding what data means, how accurate it is and ultimately, what story it is telling you, can truly be a challenge. The idea of data literacy is to promote the collaboration of both data creators and data consumers.
The ability for both sides of the same megabyte to communicate in a common language will elevate the usage and understanding of business data to new heights. Only when all stakeholders fully comprehend what the data being generated means, can truly informed business decisions be made.
So how do we go about reaching this goal − this goal of mutual understanding between creator and user?
First and foremost, employees need to increase their critical thinking skills to understand how the data journey impacts data quality and usefulness. An employee that is empowered to feel comfortable asking data-related questions is an effective data-crunching machine.
The ability to track data through its lifecycle, from creation to ultimately enabling wise business decisions, is key. Upping the ability of any employee to critically track the lineage of data and to do effective and impartial impact analysis is vital to the democratisation and demystification of data.
Every single person that relies on data to excel at their job and meet their goals should become a data expert.
Frontline data workers need to be upskilled on how to follow the complete lifecycle of individual columns, individual bits of data, through multiple processes and thereby be able to glean even the tiniest bit of insight into how data is changed throughout their organisation.
What else can be done to facilitate this process?
Machine learning is vital in its own way. With the sheer volumes of data being generated by people and processes all over the world, it is literally impossible for the human eye and brain to process everything.
Never ever fully replacing the human touch, machine learning should be a tool that is easily accessible to data workers to ease the load, to trawl through masses of data and to help find basic patination. As the demand for information grows, potentially overloading IT, business intelligence, or data engineering and creating a bottleneck, tools like machine learning will assist massively in overcoming these challenges.
Organisations should expand the skillsets of information users, enabling them to use the data directly and putting the self-service analytics tools they need right at their fingertips.
With traditional data warehouses moving to the cloud, bringing with it a new stack of tools, the playing field we are all used to has changed beyond recognition.
Until recently, data was “owned” by IT departments. Various departments used data to make business decisions, but they always had to go through IT to get to it.
Bear in mind that the goal of data democratisation is to enable anyone at any level to use data at any time to make decisions, with no barriers to access or understanding. It therefore stands to reason that data needs to be readily available, and being able to adopt modern and relevant architectures that can be deployed on the cloud within the blink of an eye is essential to this cause.
Data democratisation is the ongoing process of enabling everybody in an organisation, irrespective of their technical know-how, to work with data comfortably, to feel confident talking about it, and, as a result, to make data-informed decisions and build customer experiences powered by data.
So, what happens when you are working in an organisation in which the data experts, or the people that hold the intrinsic knowledge of what the data is telling us, are too busy to help? A definite shift in the culture that historically surrounded the analysis of data is needed.
Every single person that relies on data to excel at their job and meet their goals should become a data expert. No question about it.
Everyone in an organisation should feel confident talking about data and, more importantly, be fully equipped with all the necessary tools. They should all have the appropriate knowledge to work with data and get answers to their questions without dependencies.
Every single person in an organisation should be given the opportunity to make meaningful contribution to data projects.
There is no proven one-size-fits-all approach to building a data democracy, but empowering people is a crucial step in that direction.
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