Data Democracy and the 3 other phases of data access

"Knowledge is power," says an old saying. Even though data isn't necessarily the same as knowledge, it's an important ingredient for it. Access to more data gives you the ability to gain more knowledge, and therefore more power. Now the question is whether, as the CEO of an organization, you'd immediately want to share that power, but since we're already digging up sayings: "two heads know more than one," so if you share data, the knowledge within your company increases. With more knowledge, you also boost your employees' engagement, increase the organization's effectiveness, and create an important precondition for innovation. Who wouldn't want that?

What is Data Democracy?

Contrary to what you might expect, Data Democracy doesn't refer to the way an organization is governed or its governance structure. Data democracy stands for making the key data within your business processes freely available to everyone in the organization. It comes down to everyone having access to the data and being able to understand it. This creates a level playing field for everyone in the business to contribute to the company's development based on facts and data. Because those who are well informed also feel more engaged with the business result. And those who feel engaged also think along. An additional advantage of this is that there's a good chance more innovative ideas will emerge this way, helping you move forward.

Phases of data access

So we have plenty of noble goals for our data. But does it actually deliver anything? To answer that question, it's good to first look at the alternatives.
Suppose access to data is in an Anarchist state. In this case, IT/BI in your organization isn't able (in time) to meet the information needs from the business. As a result, standalone reports (Excel!) roam around your organization and everyone maintains their own version of the truth. Aside from the frustration, this brings significant risks in terms of data security, and it also blocks the ability for your employees to respond to new information.

It can also happen that you've ended up in a Data Monarchy. In this state, you see great inequality within your organization when it comes to the accessibility of your data. Some departments have access to extensive data and good tools, while other departments see none of this at all. This has long been the standard in BI: data warehouses with carefully organized data, labor-intensive reports that, due to their complexity and investment, were only available to "management." The advantage of this form is that control over data is very high, but unfortunately the price for that is that data is inaccessible to most employees because they can't see or use it. This causes paralysis, because these employees don't feel involved in decisions.

The realization that there was much to gain by doing more with data therefore emerged at various organizations, and in an attempt to extract more insights from their data, specialists were brought in. With specialized data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, or whatever other fancy titles, a Data Aristocracy quickly emerges. Here, insights are actually extracted from the data and larger analytics projects really get off the ground. At this stage, companies begin moving toward genuinely data-driven working and start to see its added value. But companies know more than just the data scientist, and real innovation often arises on the work floor. In this form, the work floor sometimes gets some access to data, but free use for everyone still seems far off in the data aristocracy.

Innovation with Data Democracy

Innovation is "the application of new technologies in products, services and processes, or the development of new products, services and processes"[1]. That's exactly where the key lies: because innovation is unpredictable, it can't be forced either. But it is possible to create conditions under which innovation is facilitated. Access to accurate and relevant information is one of the most important of these. Of course, even under the best conditions, it's not likely that everyone in the organization will suddenly come up with innovative ideas. After all, there's still work to be done… But daily work itself benefits when everyone in the organization is familiar with the goals and how things stand. Decisions get better when they're made based on data; they gain more support when everyone can also see and understand that data. Because everyone in your organization is well informed, there's also a greater chance that the right decision gets made without management needing to get involved.

Knowledge is power. And sharing knowledge within your organization increases effectiveness, helps optimize processes, and improves results. But that doesn't happen automatically. Loosely translated, with great power also comes great responsibility. We'll go further into this "Peter Parker principle" and other rules of the game and tools within your Data Democracy in the next blog. For now, we'd like to challenge you to think about how data-democratic your organization is.

Written by Louis de Roo
Data Strategy Leader
E-mergo