Business Intelligence (BI) has become an important part of most businesses. BI powers decision making, encourages smart and fact-based decision-making, improves business productivity, and facilitates access to critical information. Trending is also more complex BI that is dependent of real-time data and machine learning. However, BI can never be more right or wrong than the data that powers it.
A common statement is that data may be one of a company’s most valuable assets. But to capture the full potential of the data is not always easy. The complexity can be many, but data quality and correctness are often one of the big challenges. Good data quality is critical when trying to find correct insights, make the right analysis and decisions, and at the same time follow regulations and security policy for the data used. Apart from the direct impact on revenue, poor data quality increases the complexity of data ecosystems and leads to poor decision making and finally lack of trust in the analysis from the company and its employees.
As regulations for data privacy and security become more stringent, data quality management has become important for business excellence. The answer to the problem is to understand how to classify data, knowing where it comes from, who has access to it, how it is used, and how long it can be kept.
For BI, data governance has become a top priority for organizations, big and small. This is also driven by the complexity and number of data sources needed to support analytics initiatives that are increasing. A good data governance strategy will help improve BI investments, and enable a healthy balance between data consistency and transparency. This will set the foundation for accurate, secure, and legal decision-making with one source of truth.
Modern BI-tool, like Microsoft Power BI, allows business users to access and explore data without any experience in BI, data mining, and statistical analysis. This self-service makes data governance even more important to maintain a single source of truth when making crucial business decisions.
Fortunately, Microsoft Power BI provides a rich set of capabilities to enforce the company’s data governance. With centrally monitoring of how data sources are used, how solutions are implemented, Power BI helps companies to follow their data governance, and thereby building long-term trust in the data assets.
Decision Labs helps clients with data governance strategy, and everything needed for a successful BI implementation.
