Weak Governance Wastes Intent Data

Data governance has never been the highest priority on any tech leaders’ to-do lists. It’s not particularly sexy or especially exciting, but it has finally had its “glow up” and has emerged as a key component of today’s enterprise data strategies.

According to Aberdeen’s Senior Vice President of Research Michael Lock, in his webinar titled, “Unified Data Governance: Take Control of your Organization’s Data,” top-performing companies are industry leaders because they are able to responsibly manage the challenges innate to massive data growth, and they also use their data environments as meaningfully strategic advantages that drive improved performance.

The world of analytics has evolved in many ways; non-data scientist users are more empowered to embrace analytics and the technologies that support this new analytics userbase, such as interactive data discovery, artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning.

In addition to the evolution of analytics, related technologies, and the userbase, the richness and diversity of available data has increased. Sales and marketing organizations, previously oft-siloed business functions with varying levels of regard for one another, are now working in enthusiastic tandem. Together, they seize the robustly actionable insights found within vast sets of market intelligence information such as buyer intent data, purchase intent signals, content consumption and active online-research monitoring, and win / loss analyses.

Aspirational analytics, however, are often ahead of the technical realities at most organizations. And, as Lock explores in the webinar, leading companies are embracing the calls for analytics with greater ease-of-use. But user satisfaction with a shiny, easy-to-use yet comprehensive analytics suite does not guarantee performance improvements.

Analytics User Satisfaction Hinges on Data Governance

Challenges abound in the modern data environment, for both the line-of-business end users who need greater access to organizational data and the data professionals fielding the requests for faster information delivery.

This newly ubiquitous desire for more available, quickly accessible, and diverse data for analysis has led to a dire need for more oversight and structure. Making data more accessible to more users opens the door to many opportunities. However, it also amplifies the necessity to do so in a responsibly governed way.

For example, according to Aberdeen research, the average organization manages 19 data sources used for analysis. Of those – again, average – 19 data sources, a whopping 46% are inaccessible. The case is clear for companies to take control and implement responsible data governance policies.

Intent data is voluminous, it is legion, and it requires major structure and governance. For example, Aberdeen is a provider of verified intent data, and that means Aberdeen’s massive sets of intent data come with huge quantities of contextual information. Providing data on 12.8 billion web pages; 3.7 billion device IDs; and maintaining an Intent Index that monitors real-time online research, company locations, prospects’ buying journeys, and NLP-powered product-keyword mapping requires mature data governance capabilities.

To complicate this further, Aberdeen is a provider of verified intent data — meaning that those huge sets of information, plus Aberdeen’s intelligence about that information, is being delivered to organizations seeking a competitive edge. Any recipient of such quantities and diverse kinds of data would need to ensure the right users can access the data they need. They would need to do that by implementing the right procedures and capabilities to enable timely delivery of accurate data.

Weak Governance, Low Satisfaction

In Lock’s webinar, he explored the correlation between mature data governance and user satisfaction. He found that organizations that report successful metrics in user satisfaction also have strong data governance capabilities.

Aberdeen research shows that companies with mature governance capabilities out-satisfy their users compared to those companies with weaker governance. In fact, their users are:

• Over 3x more likely to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their ability to share data
• Over 2.6x more likely to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the ease-of-use of data systems
• Over 3.3x more likely be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the speed of information delivery

Governance has historically been seen as a barrier to data accessibility, but it’s evident that a well-developed approach to data governance actually reduces the friction within the data environment.

The defining capabilities that comprise “strong” or “mature” data governance are:

• support for cross-functional data sharing,
• formal support for business users connecting to new data sources, and
• a corporate mandate / initiative for encouraging data-driven decision making,
• staffing initiatives dedicated to analytical skillsets.

Let us return to the intent data example and apply the symptoms of weak data governance:

• If a company partners with an intent data provider, that company has made a major investment.
• If the company receives its intent data insights and related market intelligence, but has a weak data governance strategy, it is likely that the flow of information between decision makers, Sales, and Marketing is also weak.
• If the actionable insights are not flowing, and are stuck in a repository accessible only to two IT staffers, it is likely that those insights become stale and no longer relevant or actionable.
• Without a corporate mandate to encourage Sales and Marketing to dig into those insights, then no one is spurred to seek out that inaccessible data.
• If there is no formal support or analytics training for the sales reps and marketers who are new to the citizen data scientist gig, there’s nothing they can do about the potential leads and prospects who now exist as stale data that only two employees can access.

You can see why the capabilities that define mature data governance are critical to the success of any data-driven initiatives. Or, less myopically, the performance of any organization.

In fact, Aberdeen research shows that companies practicing mature data governance saw 150% more organic year-over-year revenue increase than companies with less mature governance.

The companies with mature governance also decreased their year-over-year operating costs by 216% more than their peers with weaker governance.

Companies with mature governance also report 20% higher likelihood of having accurate data records, and a 19% higher likelihood or delivering data on time.

If those performance improvements, user satisfaction rates, and ability to avoid data waste are not enough to convince you that mature data governance is no longer an option, email us to access the full webinar.