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By Morne de Villiers, Integration Architect and Project Manager at TechSoft International

Global data creation is expected to surge past 180 zettabytes by 2025. But it is one thing to create data and another thing entirely to make sense of it. With data used to drive modern business engagements, identify growth opportunities, and refine the customer experience, every organisation needs to make the information as accessible and understandable as possible to a broader employee base. This is the space in which data democratisation becomes critical for business success.

Data democratisation can be defined as the ability of information to be accessible to the average end user. Therefore, extending its reach beyond data scientists and ensuring that every person in a company can access and use it to improve their daily tasks and enrich their interactions with customers and other stakeholders becomes non-negotiable in a digital world.

There are many business benefits associated with data democratisation. These include making faster and better decisions, identifying opportunities for product innovation, empowering individuals and teams with relevant information, reducing costs, and enhancing upskilling and reskilling.

It comes down to harnessing the value from the generated data to optimise the business's operating environment regardless of size or industry sector. A better understanding of data brings with it improved policies and products while also leading to happier and more productive employees.

Improved decision-making

One of the fundamental drivers behind data democratisation is its accessibility of data. People need to view the information being collected to improve their decision-making processes. This applies not only to the corporate world but to people's personal lives. Data democratisation helps engender trust and accountability between companies, employees, and customers.

For instance, in the public sector, citizens having access to data and the tools to analyse and understand it not only improves their experiences of government services but empowers departments to improve their service offerings.

Value-based environment

Of course, data is one of the biggest sources of value at every organisation. It is what differentiates one business from the next and delivers the competitive advantage to be successful. Data democratisation takes the value inherent in the data and breaks down the traditional silos of bringing an understanding of it between departments.

In doing so, companies can respond faster to market changes and identify the areas where efficiencies can be introduced to cut down on costs. From a service delivery perspective, having data accessible to all employees helps to bring about a transformation in the service experience for customers. For instance, call centre agents having sight of all relevant information of a customer, including their engagement history with the organisation from a centralised platform, will yield faster responses to addressing any queries.

In this value-driven environment, it is hardly surprising that studies reveal that data democratisation for businesses can improve profitability, enable superior customer satisfaction, improve efficiencies, and speed up the decisioning process.

Innovation support

Data democratisation enables companies to transform themselves from within and become more innovative faster than ever.

By reducing the complexity associated to the data sprawl created by disparate systems, data democratisation can deliver a shared environment with tools and support to enhance all aspects of the business. With employees having more time to review and understand the data, they can deliver far more strategic value to the organisation than being limited by the daily grind of figuring out which data is important.

An enabling data environment also provides an organisation with the scalability it needs to address any growth requirements as the business demands mature over time. The data democratisation process allows for the inclusion of more automated technologies that can create efficient pipelines to benefit from modern tools and solutions to equip employees to identify business opportunities as they emerge.

Change is coming

Given how data has permeated every facet of an organisation, democratising it is an inevitable process for a company looking to remain relevant in an increasingly connected world. Smartphones, Internet of Things devices, edge computing services, and cloud computing platforms will continue to create, store, and distribute data at an accelerated pace.

This will only be spurred on at a time when hybrid work has been normalised. The need to use the cloud and artificial intelligence to effectively examine, analyse, manipulate, and extract value from this data is clear. Companies must embrace advanced technologies to unlock the potential of the data they have at hand.

However, if the public and private sector, employees, and individuals cannot access data and there is a lack of transparency and trust, innovation and business growth become constrained. Opportunities will be missed, and data will just continue to grow without any value being derived from it. Data democratisation mitigates against the risk of this happening by making the consumption, analysis, understanding, and reporting of data available to everyone.