How can we cross-sell and increase sales to existing customers? Which customers in our vast database are most likely to purchase a new product? What decisions should we make and what strategy should we adopt for the future?

These questions have answers, but they’re only accessible to companies that have a well-organized and reliable database capable of providing accurate information to support calculations and projections.

It’s pointless to have a database if you can’t extract the best insights from it. It’s equally useless to have data that’s unreliable or of poor quality. The success of your company hinges on data quality: how it’s collected and categorized, how easily it can be retrieved, its lifecycle, its meaning, and who can access or modify it.

Data Governance

Companies are facing a growing need to bring order to their databases, which are often scattered across disparate systems. And they need to ensure their data remains useful and relevant for the long term. That’s why data governance is becoming increasingly important.

Data governance isn’t just about complying with data privacy regulations like the upcoming [mention specific US regulation if applicable, otherwise omit]. Data security, which is a key aspect of such regulations, is just one component of data governance. Data governance also involves defining rules about who can access specific data, which in practice minimizes the risk of data breaches.

But we want your company to go beyond just security. We want you to use your data to make better decisions, develop effective strategies, and shape your future!”

Getting Your House in Order

Governance is a journey, and it requires a lot of hard work. Start by focusing on getting your house in order. Then, maintain a clean house.

1. Data Mapping

“Ideally, you should start by mapping and analyzing all your data, both structured and unstructured, across all systems, including legacy systems. This will help you understand where your data resides, who uses it, whether it’s sensitive, and if it can be unified.

Companies often have data scattered across different departments and systems, with varying uses. Customer data, for example, might be found in Marketing, Finance, and Logistics, in different Excel spreadsheets or CRM systems. There’s almost certainly duplicate and outdated data lurking somewhere.

The good news is that there are software solutions that can scan all your existing systems. They capture data, verify whether it’s sensitive, extract it, and unify it into a single location, eliminating duplicates. This mapping process works for both structured data and unstructured data like images, emails, Excel files, PowerPoints, contracts, and HR records. It’s a huge help.”

2. Data Access

“Data mapping also helps you understand who has access to which data and who can modify it. At this stage, you’ll need to define access policies so that the necessary information is released only to those who actually need to use it – and no one else. This is critical, as it reduces the risk of data leaks and ensures data integrity. After all, only authorized individuals will be able to modify or delete the data.”

3. Anonymization

“Access to sensitive data (whose protection is mandated by data privacy laws) can be extended to more teams within the company through anonymization. This means the data is still accurate and valid for internal studies and projections, but it’s disconnected from its real owner, making it impossible to identify them. You can anonymize data by, for example, replacing real customer names and social security numbers with fictitious ones.

Automated rules can also be used to process data. But to get to that point, you’ll need to treat your data, which is the subject of the next step.”

4. Data Treatment (or Data Cleansing/Data Management)

“With data centralized, you can treat it. This means standardizing, recovering, correcting, using, and reusing data according to established methodologies. Data also has a lifecycle, so the idea is to keep it healthy for as long as your company needs it.

We’ll delve deeper into this topic in our next post, which you can read here.

Governance is a journey that involves technology and knowledge, and its success depends on people and processes – and therefore, on the company’s culture. Trust us, this is the right path. And we can help. Just reach out!