We live in a digital age which is increasingly being driven by algorithms and data. All of us, whether at home or work, increasingly relate to one another via data. It’s a systemic restructuring of society, our economy and institutions the like of which we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. In the business world we commonly refer to it as digital transformation.
In this algorithmic world, data governance is becoming a major challenge. Data is fueling the entire transformative process which means good data quality is vital. Without it, we could find ourselves running into problems of process execution and bad customer service.
This chart illustrates this new landscape. Business relies on technology, processes and people. Data governance lies at the heart of these interactions. It is the cog in the wheel which makes everything else go round. If it has a problem, the entire system breaks down.
All of this is very easy to say, in theory, but what does it mean and how will we deal with it in practice?
What is data governance?
The standard definition of data governance refers to the ability to manage every aspect of enterprise data including integrity, security, availability and usability. Data sources are everywhere, in many formats and many standards. We need to extract and elaborate insights that feed daily enterprise decisions.
I’m currently conducting research with Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in data integration, to investigate how companies can harness the benefits of a comprehensive data governance strategy in an extended scenario where data drives business decisions. If those decisions are bad it means poor outcomes, higher costs and lower revenue.
During our collaboration, I discovered many aspects of the data governance framework that ambitious companies need to refer to and many real-life case studies of companies that rely on data governance as a strategic asset. As usual, I like to look at how data governance is being applied in the real world. So, let’s go through it industry by industry.
Data Governance in the Financial Services
EURONEXT is a European stock exchange that combines five stock exchanges (Netherland, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal and France) and deals with more than 100TB of transactions. You can imagine the huge data problem they are dealing with.
To analyse all that data, they had to wait six to twelve hours after closing. Using Talend Big Data and Talend Catalog, they boosted their performance while respecting integrity, availability and, most importantly, this highly-regulated market.
Data Governance in Energy
UNIPER is a global energy provider that generates, markets and trades energy on a large scale. They are dealing with more than 100 data sources, including IoT devices, from various external and internal sources. Using Talend Data Catalog and Talend Cloud Real-time Big Data, they achieved astounding results. The cost of integrating data reduced by 80%” and the speed of integrating data increased by 75%”. Those are some seriously impressive numbers.
Data Governance and Bookmakers
PointsBet is an online bookmaker in Australia offering both traditional fixed odds markets as well as private betting. As they prepared to launch their online sports betting products in the United States, they were concerned about the time needed to be fully operative. Using Talend Cloud Data Integration, they managed to go live within days while respecting the company plan. Now that’s what I call availability!
Data Governance and Pizza
Of course, some of you may be thinking, ‘Antonio is Italian and he will not be able to resist talking about pizza’, and you’d be right, but how can data work with pizza? Well it can if we talk about one of the biggest names in pizza delivery which is leveraging data to raise their performance and customer experience.
I’m talking about none other than Domino’s, the largest pizza delivery company in the world. They are pursuing an ambitious omni-channel strategy to allow their customers to order pizza from any device they like including phone, PC, tablet, smartwatch or social media. They are striving to offer a truly distinctive customer experience which is why they turned to Talend Data Fabric and Talend Data Quality. Using these, they can manage 85,000 data sources of structured and unstructured data and 17TB of data while enhancing customer engagement and business performance.
What a pizza!
But please, try to refrain from eating pizza with cappuccino. It’s not fair to Italians.
In conclusion, whether you work in energy, the financial services or pizza, you need to handle huge amounts of data, all of which must be available, secured, usable and integrated. A good data governance framework can enhance your business performance across the board and your customers will be the first to feel the benefits. If they’re happy, your revenue will start to look pretty good too.
So I’d like to finish by giving a big ‘thank you’ to Talend for all the material they’ve provided me for this research. It has really helped me demonstrate the importance of a good data governance strategy in the world of digital transformation.
#TalendInfluencer #DataGovernance #BigDataAnalytics #DigitalTransformation
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