The Growing Need for Data Democratization

Source: Multichannel Merchant

This article will enable you to explore how to break the silos and connected systems swiftly via data standards in order to power the analytics, create hybrid environments and modernize data.

Democratizing data refers to breaking down silos and connected systems efficiently and quickly. This implies providing access to data for your users anytime, anywhere and from any data source. In a world with millions of business transactions, social networks, legacy systems, cloud applications and IoT, data is abounding and this is making the democratization of data even more challenging than ever before.

Data democratization is a principle that suggests data must be available to each and everyone in a given system or company, not just key leaders or specialists. The data democratization principle has brought various transformations in enterprise IT. Among them, the idea of service and self-service architectures that enable large number of users to access the sets of data.

Technology And Policy Are The Two Mandatory Conditions For Data Democratization

From the point of view of policy, you must have well-documented practices and systems that make sure your organization has an individual source of truth. Good data governance makes sure that data is reliable, consistent, complete and accurate. But, it needs to make sure that at right time, right data is being accessed by the right people. ‘No access’ is the default level of access in traditional models. As exceptions to the rule, people are granted access. But, if you start writing a policy that values democratization of data, then universal access is, the rule-based and default exceptions are established as exceptions. How your organization defines and treats exceptions is key to understanding your form of data governance.

From the technology perspective, it is important that you have a data warehouse that can enforce your data governance policy and automate data cleaning so that everyone in the organization knows that there is a single source of reliable truth they can trust. It is highly important that the warehouse enables row-level and role-based security so you are ensured that even if universal data access is encouraged and promoted, that it is also role-appropriate. And it is highly important that you have a reporting environment that enables self-service ad hoc reporting. It also sees whether your reporting environment is reasonably priced. It truly does not matter how many sensational features a reporting platform has, the true data monetization will be a financial impossibility if the cost per license is very high.

Truly democratizing data needs some work to make it more understandable to each and everyone. We wouldn’t have to run more queries ideally, interpret graphs or charts, understand the analysis behind the results, cohort table joins or comparisons in SQL, or perform time series analysis. Data offers us with a window into the world and we must allow people to access that world just because they don’t know how to utilize certain tools - this is not democratization of data. Democratization requires that we offer people with a simple way to interpret the data. It needs sharing information in a form that each and everyone can learn and understand.        

You must utilize this data to make agile decisions, optimize offerings, develop new products and reduce costs. So, how do you approach a data body that is getting doubled for every 2 years? The ideal way to make the maximum use of this data is via time tested standards to create hybrid environments, modernize data and to power analytics.

Hybrid Environments

Hybrid IT embracing hosted and on-premises private cloud, along with present client-server applications hosted on the cloud infrastructure, SaaS and public cloud is the future of enterprise IT. You will not have time to learn each and every API and format for every data source. You must access the data wherever it is present as soon as possible, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

In hybrid environments, the optimal way to approach data democratization is through industry-standard interfaces like OData, ADO.NET, JDBC and ODBC. In this way, without having the need to maintain code or multiple APIs, the data is treated like a relational database and it functions with the SQL tools that are familiar to you. Provide point-and-click access across various sources of data in real-time with no stale data or duplication.

Powering Analytics

Will it be possible to derive benefit from and take action on the overwhelming flow of data without learning anything new, moving your data or disrupting your business? Affirmative! Standard interfaces enable you to unlock the Business Intelligence potential of your data silos and allow you to perform a number of tasks with your BI infrastructure and existing skills.

The result? For direct access to new kinds of data, you can respond to demands quickly. Make the maximum use of OData to obtain insights from data on the cloud resources such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Utilize standard ODBC connectivity from Business Intelligence tools to various data sources. Ingest SaaS data sources with Apache Sqoop and JDBC to develop a marketing data lake for analytics.

Data Modernization

The legacy systems are here to stay and this is the reality. They are a core component of large number of businesses and a costly and difficult to replace. The point of data modernization is to combine these legacy systems with the modern data from analytics, mobile and cloud applications.

No one will show interest in working in an IT department with the technology infrastructure that seems quite inflexible. The archaic architecture can make it almost impossible to share the information effectively in a timely manner without modernizing. This leads to non-standard and manual workarounds. You must make the maximum use of data standards in order to make this data easily shareable, real-time and fast.

Get Started with Data Democratization

Data differentiates you in a marketplace that is crowded along with defining your business. As the online tools make democratization much easier to accomplish, the concept’s proponents believe it will narrow the playing field between smaller businesses and big brands. This, in turn, will create new business models, change the way businesses make decisions that are driven by data and open the doors to new business opportunities.

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