The way you collect, store, and process data can make the difference between reliable data with powerful insights and unreliable results that might lead you in the wrong direction. To optimize business intelligence (BI), you need strong data governance policies and procedures for informed decision-making.

You also need strong governance to help guide your cybersecurity practices. A consistent approach to data governance can help protect and secure your data.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• The Importance of Governance in BI
• The Importance of Governance in Data Security
• Turning Compliance into Competitive Advantage

The Importance of Governance in Business Intelligence

Governance plays a significant role in business intelligence, especially when it comes to data integrity. If you can’t trust the data used for input, you certainly can’t trust the insights you get. To get trustworthy data, you must have stringent governance in place.

Data governance is crucial for business intelligence in several ways.

1. Data Quality and Accuracy - By enforcing governance policies, you get more accurate and higher-quality results. Data validation, verification, and cleansing of data systematically and reliably inspire confidence in analytics and reporting.
   
   
2. Consistency and Standardization - Establishing governance standards and best practices for data modeling, integration, and reporting produces a consistent and standardized way to measure and use data to draw meaningful comparisons and correlations.
   
   
3. Data Ethics and Accountability - Governance also provides the mechanism for ethical data-handling practices. By defining roles and responsibilities for data collection, storage, and processing for users, you promote accountability and transparency.
   
   
4. Optimization of Resources - BI initiatives can produce significant results, but they can also be resource-intensive. The right governance policies should align with business priorities, and aid in resource allocation.

The Importance of Governance in Data Security

Governance also plays a critical role in securing your business intelligence data. Establishing policies, processes, and controls ensures data is protected and secure.

Governance is essential in data security, including:

• Regulatory Compliance - Whether your industry is subject to data or privacy regulations from the GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOX, or others, governance ensures compliance with applicable laws and puts controls in place to avoid legal and financial risks.
  
  
• Access Control - Establishing processes to manage data access keeps data private, allowing only authorized users with a legitimate business reason to access sensitive data. Role-based access controls (RBAC), micro-segmentation, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) as part of your data governance policies can limit access and keep data secure.
  
  
• Encryption - Encryption is a fundamental component of data governance policies, encrypting data while it’s being accessed or transmitted and while it’s in storage. Encryption protects data from unauthorized access. Governance policies define encryption and encryption key standards.
  
  
• Prevention and Incident Response - Governance also applies to the detection and prevention of cyber threats and incident response. Deploying governance principles for monitoring, detecting, and mitigating threats, helps keep data secure. Governance should also apply to incident response, including plans, roles, responsibilities, and reporting.
  
  

Turning Compliance into Competitive Advantage

Companies should never look at compliance as a check-the-box exercise. You aren’t complying with regulations just to fill out a form or feel good about your organization. Compliance measures are in place to protect you and mitigate risk. As such, compliance should be part of your overall risk management strategy. Done properly, this can turn compliance into a significant competitive advantage.

Better data quality provides better insights. Accurate, reliable data gives business leaders the confidence to make informed decisions.

Enhanced Customer Experience

In today’s environment, the customer experience is paramount. A poor experience can damage even companies with good reputations while a positive customer experience can produce significant results. Study after study demonstrates the importance of customer experience:

• Two-thirds of customers say CX is the prime driver for loyalty, more important than brand and price combined. (Gartner)

• 65% of customers say positive experiences throughout the customer journey are key to long-term relationships. (PwC)

• 52% of consumers say they will switch to a competitor if they have just one negative experience. (Zendesk )

Today, more than two-thirds of companies say they compete primarily based on customer experience — nearly double the number who said the same thing a few short years ago — and data is a foundational component of crafting that positive experience.

Organizations that prioritize data governance see a significant competitive advantage by improving the customer experience, such as by offering personalized experiences or product recommendations.

Transparency and Trust

Governance also produces transparency, which begets trust. When customers know you take data privacy seriously, they are more likely to do business with you. 90% of Americans say data privacy is an important issue and nearly half of the adults globally say they have ended relationships with businesses over data privacy policies.

Compliance with data protection policies also generally includes communication with customers about data collection, storage, and usage. This also promotes transparency and confidence in your data policies. Depending on where buyers reside, they may also have certain customer rights over the control of their data.

Stronger Cybersecurity

Ultimately, companies that have strong data compliance policies and apply them consistently have better cybersecurity. When you consider that analysts say more than 33 billion records will be stolen in 2023 and the average data breach costs companies as much as $4.3 million to mitigate, strong compliance programs and processes are essential parts of your cybersecurity strategy.

A Secure Business Intelligence Platform

Wyn Enterprises has built-in end-to-end BI security to keep your data safe and match your data governance protocols. Extensible security with role-based permissions can integrate seamlessly with your pre-existing authentication protocols, including support for industry standards such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect, Active Directory, LDAP, and others.

Wyn Enterprises makes it easy to work in a secured centralized environment, so you can configure governance and security rules to manage roles, permissions, licenses, users, and security. Extensible security with user context provides row-level data security in documents or database-level security for data sources. This acts as an additional layer of security with granular data control.

Contact Wyn Enterprises today, watch a video demo of our secure business intelligence software, or try it yourself for free.