They say any press is good press, but it’s likely that most businesses that have been in the press for data leaks and data losses would beg to differ. Business is becoming more electronic, with organizations depending more than ever on the completeness, availability, accuracy and security of their data — and making data stewardship a critical concern.
But what are the most effective ways to protect your company’s information from losses, inaccuracies, errors and holes? As it can be a significant investment of your time and money to bolster every aspect of data quality, availability and security, we’ve narrowed it down to a simple list of the five most important aspects to enhancing data stewardship in the workplace.
Conduct a data quality assessment
Your organization won’t be able to enhance data stewardship if you don’t first identify what you’ve been getting wrong to begin with.
It’s in your organization’s best interest to investigate the current state of your data and improve upon that before you begin to tackle enhancing your data quality efforts from this point forward. Conducting an investigation may also open your eyes to the circumstances and scenarios under which your organization experiences the most data quality and loss issues so that you can create a plan that will focus directly on resolving those errors in the present and improving upon those areas in the future.
Every organization is different. You may find you have bad data within your legacy systems, missing or deleted files or data fields on employee devices, are storing customer credit card data incorrectly, have duplicate data that interferes with your decision making accuracy, and more.
To best detect where your organization needs to improve now and in the future, it may be in your organization’s best interest to hire an independent vendor to conduct an audit and determine the most pressing data stewardship challenges within your organization.
Stay on top of employee training
The vast majority of data related disasters, whether data leaks, losses, or errors, happen because of simple employee error. Maybe an employee loads a USB drive with files containing customer information in order to continue work at home, but then loses the USB drive. These are the kinds of errors that spell disaster for business, but they are easily avoided with the right training.
It’s not enough to have fifteen minutes of training when employees are hired, tell them to read the manual at home, and then expect everyone to follow procedure for their remaining years of employment. It’s important to continually refresh your data stewardship practices with your workforce. This doesn’t have to be a stale and boring procedure either. While you can do this through tests and required reading, you could also use social meetings with group work and prizes. Anything works, as long as it keeps good data stewardship practices fresh on everyone’s mind.
Create and communicate data quality goals
During training, your employees should come to understand data stewardship as an important and required business function that recognizes quality data as a valuable corporate asset.
In order for your employees to treat data as a valuable corporate asset, you should define your organization’s data quality goals and communicate these goals to your employees. What types of data is critical and must be complete and retrievable at all times? How often should employees scan for errors or holes in data? What procedures should employees follow to resolve errors in data, or to reinstate incomplete or deleted data?
Without goals, your employees won’t be able to measure or quantify what data quality is, and without this goal in their mind, they won’t have a measurable objective to strive for.
Have systems in place to assist data stewardship goals
Along with defining your data stewardship goals, your organization needs to have systems and procedures in place for the management and implementation of data quality improvements.
This may include having systems in place that detect errors and holes in data so that your data stewards can address them quickly, along with having systems that allow you to recover data that has gone missing or has been lost or deleted.
Cloud backup is a critical data quality tool to implement within your organization. By continuously and automatically keeping up with your newly created and recently changed files, and by giving you access to an unlimited history of previous file versions, your organization will be able to recapture any accidental change or missing data element, or reinstate any version of a lost or deleted file, simply by accessing your highly secured online portal.
No business, no matter how big or small, is safe these days without a data backup plan. It keeps your data complete and allows you to revert back to a previous file version for accuracy like no other system could.
While there are software and hardware backup options available, a good cloud based backup system is the most convenient option and the safest for your data. It doesn’t use up any resources on your system and it’s accessible from anywhere with an internet connection — allowing you to recover files from anywhere.
A backup system is critical not only because of how common employee error is, but also due to how susceptible our technology-based workplaces are to viruses and hardware failure. Lost data directly translates into lost dollars for your business. But with a cloud based data backup system, your data is never lost.
Hire a professional data steward
If your company can afford the resources, hiring a full time data steward can be a great investment. A professional data steward is like a mix between IT tech and security officer. This person is the middleman between your sensitive data and everyone else.
We talked before about how important it is to keep your company’s data stewardship practices fresh on everyone’s mind. A professional data steward greatly alleviates that concern. This ambassador will worry about the security of your company’s confidential files and ensure your business and employees are following best practices.
In short
Data stewardship was a much simpler concern in the days of paper and ink. In the electronic age, your files can be everywhere and connected to everything. If you haven’t revised the data stewardship practices of your company, there’s no time like the present. Put these strategies into practice and you’re likely to avoid the pitfall of lost or leaked data.
