This weekend, you and your friends have decided to go rafting. At first glance, it seems like a very fun plan: water, good weather, beautiful scenery, and guaranteed laughter. What could possibly go wrong? However, when you're all geared up, in the boat, and ready to go, half of them don't pay much attention and don't paddle, so the boat moves very slowly. In another stretch, a couple of them decide to be funny and paddle in another direction, so the boat keeps changing course. At another moment, one of your friends falls without a life jacket, and you have to go back to pick them up. In short, a plan that seemed very fun at first turned out to be a disaster.
A company is like a boat: it's made up of a bunch of teams that all need to paddle in the same direction for things to work properly and to stay on course. But it's not always like that, as in many cases, teams become individualized, thinking only of themselves, causing the project to fail.
This is the reality for many companies today that are starting to use their data: its use is limited to a few analysts with very specific skills or to the top executives of the organization. They are the ones steering the boat and are coordinated among themselves; however, the rest of the employees are not enabled or trained to use the information, so they don't paddle, don't know how to paddle, or paddle in another direction. Consequently, the boat sometimes moves very slowly, other times it keeps changing direction, sometimes it doesn't have a fixed direction, or even worse, it's a dangerous place with no control whatsoever.
If all employees in an organization had access to the data and its utilization, they could extract valuable insights to make better decisions daily and thus, collectively improve the performance of their company, all heading in the same direction. It's necessary for information to be accessible to all departments, without any barriers to access or understanding. This is called data democratization, and if you want to reach your destination safely, you need it in your business.
How to intelligently leverage information
Democratization means that all users in an organization, both technical and non-technical, can share, interpret, and use data to generate value for everyone. But how can you intelligently leverage information? There are three fundamental points you need to consider if you want to effectively democratize that data in your organization:
1. Transforming data into information
Companies have daily access to a huge amount of information, not only from their customers and their purchase transactions but also from how they use social networks, web browsing data, applications, third-party data, etc. The problem is that, in most cases, all this information is fragmented, not available, not being used correctly, or the company doesn't even know what data it has or what it can do with it. The most important thing is to aggregate and integrate all this information so that you can then analyze it in real-time and extract useful information that you can leverage.
2. Data governance
Once that data becomes useful information, it needs to be well-structured and you need to have access to a fully governed, secure, and quality self-service. However, this should not be an impediment to democratization. Self-service should not conflict with data governance. Many companies protect data too much and don't want to give it to users. It's true that information must be protected and well cared for, with the relevant permissions, however, data governance already takes care of that, and we need to trust more. It's necessary to overcome the fear of enabling data for all users in the company so that they can use it in their daily work, turn it into knowledge, and make better decisions.
3. Democratize the use of information and transform it into knowledge
Finally, you need to give each user what they need, and this should not be restricted only to the executive layer, a group of technical users, or specific processes as it happens in many organizations. You need an analytical solution that accommodates everyone: both an analyst who wants to discover trends, make predictions, or use Artificial Intelligence, and a business user who wants to visualize data or navigate the platform easily.
Data activation: how to leverage data to have a direct impact on the business
Democratization goes beyond just allowing your users to access dashboards and view their data: it's necessary to activate that data, for them to extract relevant information from that visualization to make much smarter decisions, and for that to really have a direct impact on your business.
Let's give an example: let's think about an insurer's claims department. They have access to incredible information like how much a person spends on their car insurance or which brand gives them more problems. That data is there, but if no one knows it or knows how to use it, what good is it? If this company were to start doing more detailed analysis of that data and took that extracted knowledge into account, it could make better decisions to be much more profitable and competitive.
So, democratization is about making data available to everyone and making sure they can actually use it to make a direct impact on the business.
The theory is clear now, but how does all this translate into practice?
Now that you know what democratization consists of and have a clear goal of trying to get that data to really reach all layers of your company and provide value to all your employees, you might be thinking, how do we do this? What are the steps to successfully implement data democratization?
First, you have to be realistic and recognize that complete and rapid adoption of democratization is going to be practically impossible. You can't expect that overnight, all members of your organization will have access to data and know how to use the tools by magic.
One option to start would be to adopt sponsors for each area and have them energize the group to help them adjust to the new tool you want to implement because it's very complicated to tell your employees that there is a self-service platform and that's it. They need to be trained and taught persistently to learn how to use the data themselves and not depend constantly on more advanced IT teams.
Ease of use is also critical. You can't suddenly implement very complex tools that nobody will know how to handle. You have to be practical and choose something that you can really get something out of. In the market, there are super advanced and complex solutions that do incredible things, but if you're just starting in the world of data, do you think you can implement something like that? It wouldn't make much sense. It would be smarter to start with simpler and more useful solutions that will really help you and make an impact, without complicating things too much.
Therefore, with your data well integrated, using simple tools that allow you to turn them into information, and adopting sponsors to help energize the groups, you already have the first steps to achieve democratization.
What risks can the river's current bring once you've started the journey?
Democratization and self-service are two keywords that everyone understands. However, if you talk to someone about data governance, it becomes a bit more abstract. And let's not even get started on topics like Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, or predictive analytics.
This is because self-service is something we all do in our daily lives: you can pay for products yourself at the supermarket or make bank transfers from your mobile phone without having to go to the bank in person. We all have this integrated into our lives, and when it comes to democratization, when initiatives are made for self-service tools, there's a major problem of expectations. The idea is instilled that with these solutions, everyone will be able to do things by themselves, and it's not entirely true.
It's necessary that when democratizing, you model the concept of self-service very well: what you're going to deliver, when and where you're going to do it. And in the how, you have to make it very clear that it's an evolutionary process. It's not something that arrives and everyone will know how to use it innately. As we've said, it's necessary to train employees and gradually teach them to integrate this into their daily lives.
A Data-Driven transformation aims to change your company's mentality gradually, encompassing all people so they see data as another service they can use daily in their projects and decisions. It's useless to put your teams on your boat if you're not going to let them paddle because that will only hinder things.
Democratization shouldn't be the port; it should be the route to follow
Although it's easier for all of us to think that there's an objective, which is to democratize, rather than an objective, it has to be the route to follow.
The concept of democratization and how it's implemented is also changing because the world, especially technology, is constantly changing. Companies won't stop merging, buying, or selling, and creating a single democratization ecosystem with fixed rules is practically impossible. We have to keep improving and adapting to the new environments that may arise.
Ultimately, in the technological and informational era we live in, companies must use their data if they want to make a difference and be competitive against others. But the use of information should not be limited only to the most technical users, top executives, or specific projects; it should be used by all members of the organization and continuously.
For this to happen, first, the data needs to be integrated and well-governed so that it can be transformed into knowledge. Then, data democratization and self-service tools can be implemented to enable users to know how to use information intelligently in their daily decisions, so that all of this has a real impact on business performance. This goes hand in hand with a cultural change in the company, where everyone is open to changing their mindset about introducing data and technology into the company as another service at their disposal.
But in such a changing world, where technology is constantly evolving, we mustn't see democratization as an end, but as a means that needs to be continuously improved and adapted to the changes that may arise, as if it were a boat in a river from which all members row in the same direction and work together to overcome any imminent danger.