Empowering Other Teams with Access to Data
Sharing access to data across an organization (aka data democratization) can transform workflows, build confidence in decisions, and most importantly, create a healthy data culture. Having all report requests go through one person or team can create bottlenecks, cause underutilized data, and ultimately result in insights that lack relevance. On the other hand, just throwing data at everyone without proper planning will create even more chaos.
So how do we do this the right way?
Key Takeaway - Don’t start with the data. Start with the questions each stakeholder is asking, and let those questions be your guide.
If Operations wants to know what’s causing delays, give them production trends. If Finance needs to forecast spending, give them projections. If Marketing needs ROI, give them campaign costs and a sales funnel. If HR needs employee churn rates, give them historical head count trends.
But…
We have to set up guardrails for these deliverables.
- Data Governance: Lock down who can see what and make sure privacy policies are in place so that Marketing doesn’t see the personal employee reports meant for HR.
- Data Literacy: Walk stakeholders through how to use the dashboards/reports/BI tools so that Finance doesn’t say, “These are nifty graphs. What do I do with them?”
- Source of truth: This is a leadership driven decision and creates trust in the data. If the marketing tool doesn’t jive with the operations tool, have them pick one and use it exclusively for decision making. What’s most important is benchmarking over time with a consistent data source.
- Ease of use: Again, establish the questions that need answering at the beginning, then, at the end, show how to answer those specific questions using what you’ve built. Go step by step so they can’t see it as something complicated.
Throughout our careers, the team at Matters of Data never worked for an organization that had successfully implemented data democratization. And that’s because it’s a hard thing to do. But momentum is shifting. Enabling direct access to critical insights for non-technical users has become a cornerstone of what we offer our clients.
I’d love to know from you: What are some examples of resistance you’ve heard when trying to ‘share data with the masses’?