Data intelligence is your new organizational North Star

There’s no shortage of data buzzwords: data quality, data governance, data management, data integration -- the list goes on.

Don't let the term "buzzword" fool you. These concepts aren't trivial -- they're tightly interwoven and all play a critical role in data-driven decision-making. For example, data quality is key to achieving a robust data governance strategy, and data integration is integral to the data management process. However, with so many considerations at play, it’s challenging for data leaders to prioritize hygiene across the organization. Until now. Enter data intelligence.

WTF is data intelligence?

To understand data intelligence, let’s start with a more familiar concept: governance.

Data governance is about control, i.e., ensuring your data is secure, accurate, usable and properly stored. It’s a top priority for 60 percent of data leaders, followed by data quality at 46 percent. A strong data governance strategy enables better decisions, decreases costs, enhances compliance, improves client trust and reduces risk. In short, data governance is about control.

Meanwhile, data intelligence is about empowerment. Data intelligence provides a sharp understanding of data in motion. It gives insights into data lineage and history so leaders can make more informed decisions. While data governance focuses on avoiding consequences, such as fines and penalties associated with misappropriated sensitive data, data intelligence centers on identifying opportunities.

Data intelligence is unlocked when an organization’s data, traditionally housed in several disparate systems, is synthesized into a singular platform, creating a golden record. With this golden record, leaders can access real-time insights about essential metrics, including their organizational footprint and target consumer behavior.

In 2022, McKinsey predicted that market leaders in all industries would use data as a North Star for most decisions by 2025. A marker of the highest-performing companies in this emerging, data-driven world? Visibility into your organization’s entire business architecture and high-bandwidth, low-latency data transfer. These key enablers allow leaders to identify real-time market opportunities -- in other words, they unlock data intelligence.

Benefits of a data intelligence program

Data intelligence empowers your employees to make the best decisions at the right time by:

• Providing a comprehensive yet singular view of data. Organizations collect and process a jarring amount of data each day. Statista predicts global data consumption and capture will reach 180 zettabytes next year, and business data is leading this significant charge. Now, multiply this spike in data creation across your entire organization. Consider the volume of data your marketing team collects versus the data your IT team processes.
  
  Tools that enable data intelligence, including master data management (MDM) solutions, merge disparate data sources to create a comprehensive understanding of organizational health. This golden record eliminates silos, ensuring that all team members operate on the same information regardless of which department they’re associated with.

• Uncovering obscured insights: Individual data streams provide insights into departmental operations, but a golden record paints a holistic image of enterprise effectiveness. Issues experienced in one business function are often mirrored in others; uncovering these parallels is the first step toward driving down organizational cost centers. By analyzing the context and relationships within various data sources, a data intelligence program helps leaders uncover valuable insights they would otherwise overlook in the vast sea of information.

• Improving data quality and governance: Data intelligence solutions proactively manage data quality by identifying inconsistencies, errors and redundancies. By addressing these rampant issues, these systems enable clear-sighted governance strategies. Furthermore, data intelligence provides insight into cost efficiency and resource optimization opportunities. One-third of organizational data is redundant or unnecessary, and storing this data is costly. Data intelligence allows leaders to focus on storing and processing necessary data and securely discarding the rest.

Leaders who prioritize data intelligence (1) get a handle on their data resource and governance strategy, (2) unlock real-time insights and (3) eliminate organizational silos. Together, these benefits create a keen competitive advantage: innovation. Enterprises adopting data intelligence solutions can integrate AI and machine learning (ML) technologies more successfully. When these tools are empowered by good data, they’re far more autonomous and efficient.

And when your people are empowered with good data -- AKA, when they become data intelligent -- they can operate far more adeptly in a fast-changing market. That’s a win-win-win scenario.

Image credit: monsit/depositphotos.com

Brett Hansen is Chief Growth Officer at Semarchy and responsible for Go-to-Market operations, including marketing, business development, and alliances and partnerships. Before joining Semarchy, he was the CMO at Logi Analytics, which was acquired by Insight Software. He spent eleven years at Dell as an executive leading software product and GTM in Dell Client Group, and prior was with IBM in various marketing and channel leadership positions.