Companies need to develop their capacity making fast and data based decisions . And for that, they must empower the personnel from different areas of the business so they can conduct themselves autonomously.
To achieve the later, companies need to provide their staff access to data and information from anywhere they find themselves. This concept of democratization is strongly permeating data management strategies in organizations, and establishes opportunities as much as challenges.
As explained in this article which we deem appropriate to share, data democratization “grants end users that aren’t well versed in data management the means to access and analyse information, which allows for faster decision making. Given that these people are not data professionals, they use self-service analysis, including tools of visualization reports and BI, to work with data”.
The idea is that commercial analysts and commercial intelligence professionals free themselves from the dependence on scientists and data experts, so they can speed up their activities, develop skills linked to data management and share knowledge with other colleagues from the organization.
Obstacles
Now, even when they do offer many advantages, this road is not free of challenges. As non-technical personnel has no expertise required in data science, their job may have a lighter degree of precision; besides, data collection may demand much time, and as well question the integrity of the data sets which will they be working finally.
Faced with this, as it is explained in the note under review, organizations will have to “develop and execute a data governance strategy to enable access to the right team, and create a complete data catalogue to assist with additional collaborative work”.
It is also important that commercial users who handle data make a point of understanding the data ecosystem in the company: “This will allow them not only to free and utilize legacy data through data integration systems, but as well, it will help them transfer their knowledge to their workmates”.
Flow of access
But this is not all: for the data democratization proposal to really work, there is another main requirement: the data architecture in the organization must allow for a fluid data flow between applications. For that purpose, the suggestion is that a hybrid cloud strategy is implemented.
As it seems, data democratization requires to take into account certain considerations and precautions. But, once well on the way, it has the potential for personnel empowerment as well as of speeding up and decentralizing decision making processes in organizations.
To review more details about the data democratization perspective, we suggest the reading of this text.
Is your company moving towards data democratization? We invite you to share the steps taken!