Many businesses strive for data clarity to help run their business. One of the greatest barriers is overcoming the obstacles associated with disparate data stemming from a lack of governance. Many believe that ‘Single Version of the Truth’ should be the ultimate goal of data management. While there are many that subscribe to this theory (Forbes) and a number of detractors, our stance at Data Illuminations is that the pros associated with ‘Single Version of the Truth’ or at the very least, data management, greatly enhance the ability to uncover the insights waiting to be discovered in your data. The benefits of the ‘Single Version of the Truth’ theory include:
- Disparate data is made available through a single repository or source
- Calculations, aggregations, and business rules are applied and uniform
- Data is consistent and reliable
- Access controls are centralized to a single platform
- Greater scalability
- Data governance and security
- Enables analysts to spend more time on analysis (not data wrangling)
12 Steps To Your ‘Single Version of the Truth’
Now that you have a clear understanding of some of the many benefits associated with data management. These are the steps to help you achieve ‘Single Version of the Truth’:
- Interview analysts and end users of data
- Identify and gather information regarding data sources and reports currently in use
- Understand the KPIs and metrics currently in place
- Determine which data sources and KPIs are missing, but necessary
- Analyze data wrangling, aggregation, and staging processes to find opportunity for optimization
- Architect data infrastructure to establish optimal structure for usage
- Build out data framework
- Connect to data and extract, transform, and load (ETL) data into warehouse
- Build out aggregations and views to be made available to end users
- Perform user acceptance testing across data and KPIs
- Automate and optimize
- Release and maintenance