Myths and Mysteries of Data Democratization

A relatively new buzzword, "Data Democratization" is the new hype with companies boasting a somewhat higher maturity in Data discipline.

But what is Data Democratization, really? And what are the prerequisites to achieve it?

The Business angle

Have you ever been to a workshop where different functions come together, and it felt like they were not able to communicate and understand each other?

There are many different viewpoints in your business organisation. Many processes, each focussing on its own deliverables and seeing the world from its very own perspective.

These perspectives are commonly referred to as "business silos".

Whether you wish to grow your customer base, cut operating costs, or penetrate new markets, the easiest place to start is the most affected or most contributing business silo. Often, you notice that even within one business silo there is way too much analysis and alignment to be done, and that finding information to make fact-based decisions is not as easy as you feel it should be.

Strategic initiatives that span across business silos are exponentially more complex. Not only are you dealing with fact-hunting in a large business landscape, but you also need to overcome the differences in perspective, language, and understanding of how things work. This slows down the progress of your strategic initiatives. This can even jeopardize your whole program through delays, rework, and budget overruns.

You wish working out a shared understanding and identifying the information that can serve as input for your decisions and processes was an easy task for every team on every initiative.

This is what often gets referred to as Data Democratization. As you can see, it has less to do with Data (an IT topic often related to systems, tables, and interfaces), and more to do with Information and Knowledge: the fact-based inputs supporting business processes and decision-making.

Let's define Data Democratization (although we would prefer "Knowledge Democratization") as the ability to locate and understand the knowledge in the organization, and to use it to generate new knowledge.

Data Democratization is the state where everyone in your organization is able to locate and understand the available knowledge, and to use it to generate new knowledge.

Data Democratization means that:

• your digital initiatives are quicker, safer, and easier - because less time is spent in doing analysis and building a common understanding
• your organization is better prepared for innovation - because you can discover and ask questions that would not even come up otherwise, and use the answers to create new market offerings, improve your business processes, and reduce costs and environmental impact of your operations
• you have less worries about safety and compliance of your digital landscape - because the information your teams need to handle your data in a secure and ethical way is available to them at any time.

This is why as a Business stakeholder, you should care about Data Democratization.

Data Democratization: what it is and what it's not

There are some common misconceptions around Data Democratization. Let's break them down.

1. Data Democratization means data is accessible to everyone

Not at all! The ability to locate the knowledge does not necessarily mean the ability to access all the information and data related to it. Security and compliance topics are an integral part of Data Democratization, making sure the access and use of knowledge is safe, compliant, and ethical.

In some organisations, even the ability to discover that certain knowledge exists might not be for everyone.

2. Data Democratization is the same as decentralized governance

Although the word "democratization" might be misleading in the context, Data Democratization is not a governance model. Instead, Governance is one of the knowledge components that need to be captured in order to allow everyone to locate and understand the data. In other words, it does not mean "everyone is the owner", but rather "everyone can locate an owner of a certain viewpoint on the data".

3. Data Democratization means everyone can make their own reports

Self-service analytics is about giving the users a central place where they can do what they would typically do in Excel: generate reports, crunch data, create small process automations... The goal is to keep the data in one place, prevent it from being copied and distributed through a "shadow data landscape" of Excels, emails, and random files on Sharepoint, and give all the users the tools and high-quality data for their analysis needs.

Self-service analytics will never succeed without Data Democratization: the ability of each user to UNDERSTAND the data they come in contact with exactly as intended. But Data Democratization in itself does not yet deliver self-service analytics.

Data Democratization Pyramid

Locating and understanding your data starts with understanding your business. What kind if information and knowledge are available? How do the different pieces relate to each other? How would the people from different business silos talk about them?

Once the business reality is well-understood, we can trace it to the systems that automate its functioning. Where can we find each piece of information? How did it get there? How do different systems refer to each of them?

We have a solid foundation to locate and understand our data assets now. But how to use them securely, compliantly, and ethically? Who can we ask about them? Who uses them, and how do they use them? What are the minimal quality requirements they place to define it as usable?

At this point, we have an inventory of our business information assets, data assets, and rules and policies related to them, alongside with anything else we might need to know about them. Context is important: any initiative attempting to create a single view with one set of terms and definitions is doomed to fail - after spending months arguing over terminology and delivering a Business Glossary nobody in the business will use.

Standardization is the enemy of democratization.

This is where the unique methodology of Hakoona can help you enable everyone to find and understand the knowledge in their own language and coherently with their own viewpoint, and to safely explore other viewpoints in a guided way.

Providing a central platform (often also referred to as "Data Lake") where most important data will be made available, and implementing tooling that can support a regular business user in working with it, will enable your business users to create their own insights and automations - without creating compliance risks or breaking the governance. The information about your data that was created by Data Democratization processes should be present, available, and usable from the same central location, providing your users with guardrails to discover and monetize the data.

Data Democratization Program

Please don't!

We are serious: don't start Data Democratization Program as a separate foundational activity.

Instead, allocate some space in your strategic business initiatives to build the Data Democratization foundation alongside delivering tangible business benefits.

Before long, the additional effort you spent on your first initiatives will start paying off, lowering the risks, and accelerating time-to-value of your next initiatives.

Hakoona team can help you embed your data democratization goals into your business strategy roadmap in a non-intrusive and highly effective way.