Empowering your Organization with Data Democratization

By Andy Painter, Regional Manager, Altis Consulting Melbourne 

According to Bernard Marr in his latest article on The Top 5 Data Science And Analytics Trends In 2023 one of the most important trends will be the continued empowerment of entire workforces – rather than data engineers and data scientists – to put analytics to work, aka #DataDemocratization

I’m passionate about seeing entire workforces succeed and achieve using data and analytics, so I fully agree with him that this is an important Data & Analytics trend for 2023.

I felt it worthwhile exploring in more detail what Data Democratization is, why its important, its benefits and the steps to implement it in an organization.

What is Data Democratization?

Let’s start with an explanation of what Data Democratization is: Data democratization is the process of making data accessible, understandable and actionable to a broad range of users across an organization, regardless of their technical skill or role.

Data democratization covers data governance and management, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and compliant with regulations.

This includes providing access to data, tools, and training to people who may not be data experts but need data to do their jobs.

It also involves creating a culture where data is valued and used to inform decision-making, breaking down silos and fostering team collaboration.

The goal of data democratization is empowering people across the organization with #data, enabling them to make better decisions, improve performance and drive innovation

Ultimately, Data Democratization is important because it allows organizations to make better use of their data to drive business outcomes.

Benefits of Data Democratization

So what business outcomes and benefits can we expect from Data Democratization?

• Improved decision-making: By making data accessible to more people, Data Democratization allows organizations to make better decisions based on facts rather than intuition or gut feeling.
• Increased efficiency: When more people have access to data, they can use it to improve their performance and the performance of the organization as a whole.
• Better insights: By making data accessible to a wider range of users, organizations can gain insights that would otherwise be missed.
• Faster innovation: Data Democratization allows organizations to access new data sources and experiments with new data analysis techniques, leading to faster innovation.
• Improved compliance: Data democratization enables organizations to manage data governance, security and privacy compliance more effectively and efficiently.
• Better collaboration: By breaking down silos and fostering collaboration among teams, data democratization can lead to more effective use of data and better decision-making across the organization.
• Empowering employees: By giving employees access to data, tools, and training, data democratization empowers them to take ownership of their performance and make better decisions.

In summary, the key benefit of Data Democratization is that it allows more people to use data to make decisions, gain insights, and improve performance.

How to Empower your Organization with Data Democratization

So how would you go about implementing Data Democratization in an organisation? Here is my step-by-step guide:

1. Make data accessible: Ensure that data is accessible/stored in a central location (note: this may be physically or virtually depending on the Data Architecture chosen in an organisation) that is easily accessible to all members of the organization. This may include using a data lake or data warehouse.
2. Establish a clear Data Governance policy: Define who is responsible for managing and maintaining data, as well as guidelines for how data should be used, shared, and protected.
3. Provide training and support: Ensure that all organisation members have the necessary skills and tools to access and use data effectively. This should include providing training on data analysis and visualization tools and offering ongoing support. Data Literacy should be considered essential and core training for all.
4. Encourage collaboration: Encourage cross-functional teams to share data and insights and provide incentives for collaboration.
5. Monitor and measure: Regularly monitor data usage and feedback to measure the success of your data democratization efforts and make adjustments as necessary. This step is often missed!
6. Create a culture of data-driven decision-making: Encourage teams to make decisions based on data rather than intuition or gut feeling.
7. Implement security and privacy measures: Ensure that sensitive data is protected and that any shared data is done in compliance with regulations.

Implementing these steps will help to create a culture where data is easily accessible and used to inform decision-making, which will result in a more data-driven and efficient organization.

Summary

Hopefully, this post will have explained what Data Democratization is all about, why it is a really important Data & Analytics trend for 2023, and why the time to start the Data Democratization of your organisation is now.

Next Steps

I’d recommend that you first assess how accessible and usable your data is by everyone in your organisation to establish your current situation and how far away you may be from 100% of your organisation empowered by data. Once you have this, you can start planning the activities to move you towards the goal of Data Democratization.

If you need help with this, get in touch with us today.