Overcoming the Hurdles in Data Democratization

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2021-08-17 08:30:02

Data expert Wouter Neef from Data Booster describes five common challenges in data democratization and how to overcome them.

In this decade we can observe the emergence of a new data layer in modern enterprises, which morph into data-driven organizations, where the majority of employees become data citizens. Data are no longer a well-kept secret for the experts from analytics and engineering but can be used by any member of the organization. This process, making data available across organizations, is often coined as data democratization.

In this article, data expert Wouter Neef (CEO, Data Booster) describes five common hurdles he observed in data democratization. Wouter does not only point to problems but also shows potential solutions, saving you a tremendous amount of time in your data journey.

Wouter Neef: It is clear that data privacy legislation and data security risks require organizations to restrict access to data. As a result, democratizing employees’ access to the company’s data can be controversial. However, if access to data is limited to data teams only the dependency ratio becomes too high. Organizations should avoid creating this dependence. Instead of letting every data question go through a data analysts team, self-service for decision-makers should be promoted. This enables decision-makers to answer Quick Questions by themselves instead of passing them on as low-value and unattractive work to data experts. Instead of spending up to 70% of their time on operational work, data analysts - but also rarer data scientists and engineers - can focus on more high-value tasks.