Understanding data democratisation and its impact in today’s business.

The unprecedented growth of data has undoubtedly put immense pressure on companies to process it and excerpt actionable insights. Most businesses and employees have not accurate techniques or skills on how to effectively access the data they generate. Fortunately, recent advances in technologies capable of data analysis are allowing business users to expedite decision making and making data sharing and accessibility possible. This process of making data accessible enterprise-wide is often called data democratisation.

This new approach allows data to move safely from the data experts to the masses within an organization. Most businesses are seeing a rapid surge in data democratisation, as over 77 percent of respondents in the MIT Sloan Management Review reported an increase in access to useful data.

It is no surprise that data these days has become a new currency of modern businesses for their growth. Most forward-looking organizations identify the key factors that are required to implement their data strategy effectively. Data democratization lets organizations reconsider how they manage, distribute, and consume data. This generally requires changes in business culture to realize financial gains and vie with others.

The Democratisation of Data

In most organizations, the power of data and the ability to analyse it has long been kept in hands of data prowess or analysts. This is largely because the BI and analytical tools available were too complex for non-technical employees. These challenges have created roadblocks around organizational data that have been extremely difficult to breach, with the result being that employees often make decisions in isolation. However, the evolving landscape of technology is now making it possible for non-data analysts to analyse data effectively. This is can be achieved by democratisation of data, where information directly put into the hands of employees who need it. 

The data democratization works on major pillars:

Data: A considerable amount of data in most organizations exists in silos and catered and stored across flat files accessed by Microsoft SQL Servers, on an employee’s hard drive, or stored at partner companies. This could not be useful in providing a bigger picture. Thus, many organizations use a cloud-enabled data warehouse to tear down the silos that give an employee a consolidated, solitary source of information.

Tools and Training: Businesses gather varying types of data that cannot be processed and analysed by a single analytical tool, rather it requires different sorts of tools or data analytics alternatives. For example, Tableau Server, Tableau Desktop and open-source alternatives like caravel or Apache Zeppelin, etc. On the other side, to make sure that democratisation of data doesn’t come with data delusion, companies must train their employees by efficient dissemination of expertise through mailing lists, HipChat channels, seminars, and even ensuring that learners and experts are sitting next to each other in the office.

People: To drive effective data analysis, an organization requires open, persistent, positive, and inquisitive people. They must reward innovative minds through their appraisals. Employees also must involve in playing with data, thinking strategically and asking questions.