Drive Growth by Implementing Data Democratization with Kyvos

In today’s world, insight-driven companies are growing eight times faster than those unwilling to adopt data-driven decision-making processes. The market’s big players like Uber, Netflix, etc., are providing instant access to business data throughout their organization. They have shifted the data analytics responsibility from the IT department to all business employees.

Currently, several organizations follow the traditional data breadline, which requires employees across the enterprise to send requests to the overworked IT department to generate status reports beyond regularly distributed reports. As a result, employees waste considerable time waiting for the reports. Sometimes, the reports received are incomplete, so often, they have to wait for IT to get the information they need. This process creates a significant roadblock for internal business teams as they have no choice but to choose slow, inefficient data distribution, preventing them from making real-time data-driven decisions.

Fortunately, now companies can join the new era of data democracy. Let’s understand what is democratization of data and analytics.

What Is Data Democratization?

Data democracy is the ability to get actionable data when needed without waiting. It is an ongoing process that lowers dependency on IT and empowers employees to access enterprise-wide data regardless of their technical expertise. By adopting a democratized data access approach, organizations can enable quicker, data-driven decision-making and be ahead of the competitive curve. The shift to enable self-service, democratized data analytics for all business users requires three factors to come together to make data democracy attainable:

Empower Employees to Ask Questions

Usually, analysts are the ones guiding businesses at every step on how to improve processes, products, and services through data analysis. Now imagine if every employee has the knowledge and access to their data needs, they will feel comfortable making data-informed decisions. If this could be true, every employee could contribute to bridging the gap between data and business to improve efficiency. But in the current data landscape of organizations, the employees are held up by three challenges:

• Unable to access the required data.
• Inability to trust data for timely and accurate decisions.
• Lack of skills to find answers.

When employees say they cannot access the required data, it can be anywhere. If only employees knew of where the required data can be and the kind of data they need to access, providing access would become less complicated. So, if the employees say they don’t have access to the data, it means the organization is facing a data literacy problem that needs to be resolved to achieve data democratization. Data literacy overcomes these challenges. According to Gartner, data literacy is “the ability to understand, share common knowledge of, and have meaningful conversations about having a data-driven culture.” Therefore, it’s not enough to make data accessible to all employees; they must comprehend data literacy as a prerequisite to excel at their duties. Data literacy also enables users to ask compelling questions and put the organization’s assets to the finest use in finding answers to those questions.

Choose the Right Tools to Enable Users to Work with Data

It’s crucial to invest in the right set of self-service tools to democratize data analytics. It can help employees to work with data efficiently and create reports to get business insights without relying on others.

Discern Democratization of Data as an Ongoing Process

The journey of data democratization is not reaching a single destination; it’s an ongoing process. With the data world growing at an unprecedented rate and constant innovation in technology, a change like data democracy can become a little intriguing for employees. The shift towards data democracy does not happen overnight. Making data democratization a reality is an investment like educating employees on data literacy, implementing the right tools, and adopting the change. It takes time.

How Does Kyvos Enable Data Democratization to Solve Business Challenges?

At its center, data democratization is about empowering every employee to address the data problems they encounter daily. With the increase in data volumes and changing business requirements, it is becoming challenging for data teams to fulfill their expectations. Although democratization of data analytics may help businesses to become more efficient, as more employees get access to data, it can also bring some risks, such as

• Data security issues
• Non-technical employees misinterpret data and make poor judgments at the moment
• Failure in preserving data integrity

It’s important for businesses to implement data democratization with a solution that can help solve business challenges and help them to unlock their success. Let’s look into some of the business challenges that can be solved by achieving data democratization using Kyvos:

Eliminate Data Silos

Data democratization doesn’t require you to abandon or destroy data silos; instead, it helps connect the dots. If everyone in your team is data literate, you all can speak the same language. Data is managed where it resides, and everyone in the organization can access it and understand the information for real-time decision-making. By not holding the data hostage, you can foster a more collaborative environment where every team can have a single version of the truth to rely on. Now the question is how to achieve a single source of truth where everything is connected and consistent?

Simply migrating your data to cloud storage doesn’t help you achieve a single source of truth or eliminate the problem of data silos. It’s time to adopt a semantic layer approach to bridge the gap between business users and complex data sources. You need a solution that can address these key concerns – integrity, security, data democratization and data governance. With Kyvos, you can add a universal semantic layer in your cloud BI architecture to centralize and standardize data logic in one place while empowering users to get a consistent view of all enterprise data.

Provide Controlled Democratized Data Access

Ensuring data governance is central to data democratization. Organizations must have a robust data governance framework that ensures the shared data is high-quality, trustworthy, and securely compliant. Since data democratization shares information internally and externally with everyone in the organization, how can you be sure that your data is secure and is not misused? You need a solution to prevent your data from unauthorized access, even from the people inside the firewall.

Kyvos provides a native three-tiered security architecture that enables granular-level access control through row and column security at the group and user levels. To implement column-level security, you can explicitly define a centralized set of rules for a group of users. For row-level security, you need to specify the rows you want to hide and users or a group that can access that information.

Reduce Dependency on Data Experts to Find Answers

IT teams traditionally have the responsibility to maintain, update, track, and deploy internal applications and business services. Also, they are the gatekeepers of data access in the organization. But with the democratization of data analytics, users across the organization are empowered with readily actionable data and can get answers to their data-related questions to make informed decisions. This way, they don’t have to rely on data experts to get answers. All they need is the right tools and knowledge to work with data to excel at their job without any dependencies.

How Empowering Employees Across the Business can Help Drive Business Performance?

Employees in direct contact with customers have become even more essential in allowing businesses to determine efficiencies and opportunities to navigate this new world. Modern companies now realize the worth of providing democratized data access, tools, training, and authority to front-line employees who have to make all the decisions in real-time.

According to research, 90% of organizations say the success of any business depends on empowering all employees to make data-driven decisions now.

Modern analytics solutions like Kyvos no longer require employees to have technical knowledge. They are provided with a user-friendly interactive interface that empowers them to ask data-related questions and get answers instantly without any dependency on other teams. Data democracy significantly increases productivity and profitability, and, more importantly, leads businesses towards enhanced innovation.

Request demo