How To Promote Accessible Data Across Your Business (4 Tips)

Making your data easily accessible across your entire organization is critical for having a solid and efficient data management strategy in place.

Promoting accessible data involves creating a clear set of guidelines and a roadmap for how exactly your company will use its data sets so your end goals, incremental objectives and other targets are achieved in the best possible way. 

Businesses that manage to create and incorporate a highly-functional data management plan are capable of optimizing their operations more easily and streamlining any type of process that has to do with data, like data collection, data analysis, storage, communication networks, and so on. This also enables CIOs and COOs to gain better quality insights from processed data

In order to achieve these benefits, companies must ensure their data is highly accessible throughout the entire company infrastructure. Here are some accessible data management tips on how to do just that.

1. Identify Data Types and Map Them to Your Business Needs 

Identifying the types of data your business is using should be among your first objectives.

Regardless of the size of your organization or the industry it operates in, data is among the main bloodlines of your operations, so it is quite important to know which types of data you are processing and how to map the data management with your continuity plans and main business goals. 

Once you’ve properly identified and classified your data types and mapped them out across your entire company, the next logical step is to tackle your data processes and determine how your business is collecting, preparing, analyzing, and storing data.

i). Data Collection 

Make sure that you determine the sources from which your data comes in, who and what platforms have and need access to your data, and how your workforce is using structured or unstructured data.

Be sure to also have a firm grasp of how exactly your data is being collected, as well as whether your teams and departments use manual or automated data extraction. 

ii). Data Preparation 

Identify how your teams work with and handle your data so all the data pieces are analysis-ready. Identify any potential incomplete data pieces or disparate files so your processes for nomenclature, documentation, and overall categorization of data are as effective as possible. 

iii). Data Analysis 

Establish how data sets that your organization maintains and manages are analyzed and for what purposes. Also, make sure that the insights gathered through this process are well communicated across your staff and teams. 

iv). Data Storage 

Try to optimize how, where and for how long your organization keeps its data. Be sure to establish the use of relational databases and/or other document formats for structured data, set up data lakes for unstructured data, and tackle security for the “data at rest”.

2. Deploy the Right Technologies

Your data can be easily accessible, shareable and presentable when you use the proper tools. 

Many companies use WordPress-based websites and platforms, so we recommend ShareThis’ Google Analytics Dashboard plugin to help you move data from Google Analytics to your WP website. The plugin enables you to access and analyze visitor trends like page views, bounce rates, most viewed pages, pages per session, and see where exactly your users are coming from, etc. 

It is recommended that you consider using data reporting and visualization platforms, semantic layer reporting, archiving software, BI analysis and workforce analysis platforms, data modelling and data science software; as well as taking multidimensional expressions (MDX) or cube query tools into consideration. 

It is crucial that, once you find the right toolset for your business’ data management needs, you enable all your teams across your entire company to utilize the same set of platforms and do so in a standardized way. Otherwise, data management and analytics programs will end up being fragmented which can result in unused data or even data losses.

3. Work on Your Data Governance Strategy

In order to have easily accessible data and be able to derive valuable insights from it, company CIOs and COOs should work together to establish an effective data governance plan.

This is a task that involves high levels of responsibility as it includes tackling all the necessary policies that your business needs to have in order for your data and your company to be secure and stay compliant with laws and regulations. This procedure requires you to address and establish the following:

• Data Quality – Make sure all your data is uncorrupted, complete, relevant, current, and accurate.

• Data Transparency – Enabling your data environment to always be ethical by being open and clear about how and for what your business is using and which types of data.

• Data Privacy – Making sure permissions to gather and utilize data are clearly stated and addressed.

The policies that you should consider include encryption policy, privacy policy, email retention policy, password policies, and other similar ones that ensure high levels of data security and transparency. 

4. Accessible Data Makes the Business World Go Round 

Data is among the main building blocks of the modern business landscape and it should be treated with respect. When your company has a proper data management plan with highly accessible data, your workflow and operations can reach optimized functionality. 

This is why providing CIOs and COOs with the right infrastructure and tools should be one of your top business priorities.