Organizations need to be agile in these times, so a “pragmatic, incremental path” may be the ideal way to go, as CDW Data Solution Architect Rex Washburn and CDW Editorial Lead Shirley Parodi describe it. What they’re talking about is minimum viable data governance.
“Think of it as ‘smart scaling’ for governance,” they write. “The goal isn’t to build massive frameworks but to incorporate essential governance elements efficiently. Designed with agility in mind, it adapts governance to the imperatives of modern businesses rather than becoming a bottleneck.”
Still, a robust, data-driven culture is foundational for a healthcare organization to make MVDG work. This is especially true as AI and machine learning grow in prominence for enterprise operations. These AI-powered solutions require strong data governance from the start.
What Is Minimum Viable Data Governance?
MVDG is a set of standards, policies and practices that ensure an organization’s data is accurate, secure and usable. There are five pillars to consider for a successful MVDG strategy:
- Data Stewardship empowers the people within the organization who take active responsibility in data governance and who understand the data’s operational context.
- Data Quality maintains data that is accurate, complete, consistent and delivered in a timely fashion from the start. Data also should be continuously monitored and subject to automated quality checks.
- Data Privacy relies on proactive privacy-by-design principles built into workflows to stay on top of compliance as regulations evolve.
- Data Security balances protection and usability so that data assets stay guarded against unauthorized access or breaches while remaining accessible to authorized users.
- Metadata Management enables data discovery and understanding by adding context (such as lineage and definitions) into accessible systems, providing transparency into the data that exists.
Ultimately, data literacy is another important aspect of moving toward a data-driven culture. Organizations should demystify data and make it accessible for their entire workforce, not just for data scientists or technical teams.
READ MORE: How does minimum viable data governance enable smarter healthcare?
The Common Benefits of Minimum Viable Data Governance
MVDG’s benefits address areas that all healthcare organizations have concerns with, from dissolving silos to extracting the full value from data.
Health systems collect, create, store and transmit massive amounts of data, but they still find it challenging to derive value from that data. As Washburn and Parodi write, “MVDG ensures that processes for governing, organizing and analyzing data are built directly into operational workflows. This improves time-to-value, allowing initiatives to move from concept to execution faster and with fewer missteps.”
When it comes to getting AI-powered projects off the ground, MVDG establishes processes for data quality, improving an organization’s readiness to adopt new technologies. And it unifies data into a consistent source of truth for improved collaboration, blunting the effects of data silos, which are common in healthcare.
The Bigger Picture of Data Governance for Healthcare
Healthcare organizations can’t shy away from innovation, especially when they have communities to care for and a workforce that is struggling with burnout and understaffing. The demands on the industry are only expected to grow.
With this in mind, it’s unwise for organizations to sit on important projects because they think their data governance is too cumbersome. MVDG can empower organizations to become more agile in their work, because inaction is not an option.
