Is your data governance strategy ready for syndicated data?
Large retail and consumer product goods (CPG) companies have been buying aggregated market data—known as syndicated data—for decades and using it to glean consumer signals for forecasting and planning. This has traditionally been an expensive practice, but advanced technologies have made it more affordable for middle market companies in a variety of industries to access data analytics solutions and use syndicated data.
Adding syndicated data can broaden the insights machine learning models deliver, expanding the value of existing data, particularly for companies already using analytics. However, using syndicated data comes with some risks, so reviewing your data governance strategy before getting started is a valuable step.
Staying aligned to emerging analytics capabilities
Using syndicated data doesn’t change how you perform analysis, but it can improve the quality of your analysis, either by adding context or leading to the discovery of new knowledge. Simply put, the more verifiable signals you have when forecasting and planning, the better those forecasts and plans will be.
Adjusting your data governance strategy as analytics strategies change helps maintain data accuracy and shareability, which are essential to deriving effective insights from both internal and third-party data. A data governance strategy establishes controls for vetting, aligning, cataloging and maintaining data assets across enterprise systems so that everyone is using the same, singular source of truth. These control points occur where systems ingest the data, when the data is moved to other systems, and where and how the data is stored for use by analytics applications.
Forbes estimates that the amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed in the world grew by 5,000% from 2010 to 2020. Undoubtedly, as more data is collected by all types of organizations, it will become available as aggregated sets of data through syndication. This will present a great opportunity for your company to evolve your analytics strategy, but it also will require making sure that data governance includes controls for syndicated data risks.
