Data Democratization: Best Practices and Benefits

Introduction

Nowadays, most businesses are running based on data, and their growth depends on the insights gained from their data. Many businesses are striving to achieve the 100% quality data analysis that leads to creative business strategies using business intelligence tools. IT teams are doing wonders with data, but this privilege is restricted to the IT team alone. Even nontechnical teams such as sales, marketing, business analysis, and executive teams, can uncover brilliant opportunities for your company. But what they need is access to the data. Here comes the term data democratization, a hot topic now. In this blog post, I am going to discuss:

• What is data democratization?

• Stepping stones for data democratization.

• Data democratization—some best practices.

• Benefits of data democratization.

• How Bold BI assists in data democratization and organizational growth.

What is data democratization?

Data democratization makes data accessible to all employees in an organization. It enables them to analyze data, discover key insights in their data sets, and help their company’s growth. Data democratization helps many organizations get closer to their vision of becoming entirely data-driven. Although data democratization has its pros and cons, companies can reap the benefits of data democratization by properly implementing it.

Stepping stones for data democratization

Laying the stepping stones for data democratization helps you streamline the transition. With proper investment in budget, software, and training, you can achieve data democratization in your business. Let’s discuss some necessary steps towards data democratization.

Creating policy for data accessibility

To implement a successful data democratization model, the data must be accessible for all in an organization. For decades, data has been managed and owned by the IT team. The flow of the data has also been handled by the IT team. When widening access to other teams, organizations must create and deploy policies like authentication for user access to data and authorization for modifying or erasing data. Such policies will improve the credibility of data and insights derived by the users.

Implementing data-quality management

Data democratization is not helpful when you do not have quality data. The insights extracted from flawed data will lead to flawed decisions for the company’s trajectory. Maintaining data quality plays a vital role in a company’s growth. You can learn more about data-quality management by referring to our blog Data Quality Management in Business Intelligence.

Creating a user manual

Creating a clear user manual containing documentation procedures, policies, and procedures to use the BI tools helps your organization and employees understand the available resources, where to find them, and how to use them. It will give clarity to users and help them use the data valuably.

Implementing user permissions

Implementing user permissions is when a business chooses different access levels for different end-users. It allows users to access data relevant to their department and positions. It also avoids unwanted manipulation of the actual data.

Data democratization—some best practices

It is true that sometimes the insights shared by nontechnical people might be misled by misinterpretation. Still, we can educate nontechnical people with the proper methods to interpret data, avoid any mistakes, and ensure the growth of the business.

Proper understanding of data management

With data democratization, users have more freedom as well as responsibility. By knowing how the data is entered, processed, managed, and stored, users will be more cautious with it. This knowledge will reduce the flaws in working with the data and maximize the outcome. Training end users in data management will increase their efficiency with it.

Limit data accessibility

Enabling data accessibility for everyone helps them to find, understand, and interpret the data that will lead them to valuable business decisions. But when the data is misinterpreted, it can lead them to make some bad decisions, too. Since everyone in your organization can access your data, it may pose potential security risks. So, granting data access based on individual users’ needs, position, and skills helps them interpret the data properly and helps you limit damage. This also ensures credibility with the end users.

Embracing self-service analytics

Providing access to data is not enough for a nontechnical employee to come up with game-changing insights. You must ensure the data is easy to find, retrieve, and comprehend. Self-service BI software like Bold BI helps display the data in readable, user-friendly formats, which allows the end users to find the patterns in it. These patterns enable decision-makers to devise market strategies that help the business be one step ahead of its competitors.

Institutional training on using data

Every organization must train its employees to use these tools. By providing institutional training to their employees, a company can make them more familiar with the available tools, and therefore better at and more comfortable with using them. It will empower them to approach data analysis correctly.

Benefits of data democratization

“Expect that data democratization is an evolution where each small win, when non-technical users gain insight because of accessing the data, adds up to ultimately prove the merits of data democratization,” says Bernard Marr, bestselling author of Big Data in Practice.

The benefits of data democratization can be in the form of providing better customer experiences, operational efficiency, governance, etc.

Efficient workforce management

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In an organization, data is acquired from various resources, consisting of structured and unstructured data. When data democratization is deployed in an organization, all the procured data can be processed and transformed to gain its actual value. There is no need for quality data to remain unused. With data democratization implemented in an organization, managers can assign the tasks like data formatting, data cleaning, and processing the unstructured data to the non-technical employees which improves the quality of the data as well as it can be a potential training to the employees. Using the processed data helps managers explore the valuable KPIs in their data and uncover hidden opportunities, which helps their company gain more revenue.

Faster decision-making

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Data democratization helps nontechnical users analyze trends and opportunities, make faster decisions, and optimize outcomes without seeking any outside help. They can avoid depending on other teams for data-driven insights. Since they can access and analyze the data themselves, it saves them time on improving products and processes.

Better customer experience

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Different departments in a company can now track customer trends over time. Marketing departments can analyze the success of past strategies to provide tailor-made offers and marketing campaigns to attract customers, improving sales and overall revenue. Product designers and customer support teams can improve their products, services, and interactions with customers by correlating customer feedback data.

How Bold BI assists in data democratization and organizational growth

Bold BI is a powerful BI and analytics solution that allows you to glean insights from your complex data by visualizing it using a wide range of widgets and 150+ data sources. Bold BI’s drag-and-drop interface and user-friendly designer enable employees who don’t have a technical background to create powerful, attractive, and interactive dashboards. This helps them break down their data, spot trends, and make decisions with more confidence.

Some key features of Bold BI

Multitenancy

Bold BI’s multitenant architecture allows multiple users to share a single software application instance and its underlying resources. You can quickly deploy each environment as an individual site connected with separate database backends. It also helps you protect each tenant’s private information from others.

Self-service BI

Without any coding expertise, Bold BI helps you in self-service reporting and ad hoc analysis, enabling employees to answer business questions using various data sources.

Easy deployment

The Bold BI Embed SDK extends embedding capabilities across popular JavaScript frameworks and can be deployed in platforms such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Dockerized environments.

White labeling and redistribution

You can white label dashboards to publish them as your own. Bold BI also allows redistribution with your product so that your customers may host dashboards within their environment.

Bold BI helps you to create dashboards with many interactive features such as filters, drill down, drill through, customizable tooltips, linking, and export options. To learn more about Bold BI and its variety of features, refer to this link.

Why don’t you give it a try?

I hope now you have a better understanding of data democratization, its best practices, and its benefits.

Bold BI helps you visualize your data to see all your important metrics and KPIs in real time. It helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. You’ll save time by avoiding redundant work. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ supported data sources.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.