Contemporary organizations understand the importance of data and its impact on improving interactions with customers, offering quality products or services, and building loyalty.

Data is fundamental to business success. It allows companies to make the right decisions at the right time and deliver the high-quality, personalized products and services that customers expect.

There is a challenge, though.

Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, and new technologies have accelerated this process dramatically. As a result, organizations have significant volumes of data, making it hard to manage, protect, and get value from it.

Here is where Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) comes in. GRC enables companies to define and implement the best practices, procedures, and governance to ensure the data is clean, safe, and reliable across the board.

More importantly, organizations can use GRC platforms like StandardFusion to create an organizational culture around security. The objective is to encourage everyone to understand how their actions affect the business's success.

Now, the big question is:

Are organizations getting value from their data?

To answer that, first, it's important to understand the following two concepts.

Data quality represents how reliable the information serves an organization's specific needs — mainly supporting decision-making.

Some of these needs might be:

From a GRC standpoint, companies can achieve data quality by creating rules and policies so the entire organization can use that data in the same ways. These policies could, for example, define how to label, transfer, process, and maintain information.

Data integrity focuses on the trustworthiness of the information in terms of its physical and logical validity. Some of the key characteristics to ensure the usability of data are:

GRC's goal for data integrity is to keep the information reliable by eliminating unwanted changes between updates or modifications. It is all about the data's accuracy, availability, and trust.

Organizations that want to leverage their data to generate value must ensure the information they collect is helpful and truthful. The following are the key characteristics of high-quality data:

A powerful way to make sure the company's data maintains these six characteristics is by leveraging the power of GRC.

Because GRC empowers organizations to set standards, regulations, and security controls to avoid mistakes, standardize tasks and guide personnel when collecting and dealing with vital information.

GRC helps organizations answer the following questions:

Overall, GRC aims to build shared attitudes and actions towards security.

Unless the data companies collect is high-quality and trustworthy, there's no value in it — it becomes a liability and a risk for the organization.

Modern companies recognize data as an essential asset that impacts their bottom line. Furthermore, they understand that poor data quality can damage credibility, reduce sales, and minimize growth.

In today's world, organizations are aiming to be data-driven. However, becoming a data-driven organization is tough without a GRC program.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance enable organizations to protect and manage data quality by creating standardized, controlled, and repeatable processes. This is key because every piece of data an organization process has an associated risk.

By understanding these risks, companies can implement the necessary controls and policies for handling and extracting data correctly so that every department can access the same quality information.

Organizations without structured data can't provide any value, and they face the following risks:

Having the right processes to manipulate data will prevent organizations from missing business opportunities, damaging their reputation, and doing unnecessary repetitive tasks.

Data-driven businesses embrace the use of data (and its analysis) to get insights that can improve the organization. The efficient management of big data through GRC tools helps identify new business opportunities, strengthen customer experiences, grow sales, improve operations, and more.

For example, GRC helps data-driven businesses by allowing them to create and manage the right policies to process and protect the company's data.

More importantly, organizations can also control individual policies to ensure they have been distributed and acknowledged accordingly.

In terms of benefits, although clean data has numerous "easy-to-identify" benefits, many others are not easily identified. Trusting data not just improves efficiency and results; it also helps with fundamental, vital factors that affect business performance and success.

In this contemporary world, companies should be measured not only via existing financial measurements but also by the amount of monetizable data they can capture, consume, store and use. More importantly, how the data helps the organization's internal processes to be faster and more agile.

When people think of high-quality data and big data, they usually associate these two with big organizations, especially technology and social media platforms. However, big quality data gives organizations of any size plenty of benefits.

Data quality and integrity help organizations to:

Using the right GRC platform helps companies create and control the policies and practices to ensure their data is valid, consistent, accurate, and complete — allowing them to get all these benefits.

The key to using GRC tools is that businesses can produce what customers expect on a greater scale and with higher precision and velocity.

Now, what does this have to do with value?

By protecting the value of data, organizations are protecting their overall worth. Indeed, GRC empowers companies to create a culture of value, giving everyone education and agency so they can make better decisions.

Also, GRC helps companies tell better security stories. These stories aim to build trust with customers and partners, enter new markets, and shorten sale cycles.

A better understanding of customers and processes — through data — will lead to better products and services, enhanced experiences, and long-lasting relationships with customers. All these represent growth and more revenue for companies.

Trust is a vital component of any interaction (business or personal) and, as such, is mandatory for organizations to protect it — without trust, there is no business.

When data is not protected, the chances of breaches are higher, causing direct and indirect costs.

Often, reputation damages can cause long-term harm to organizations, making it hard for them to acquire and maintain business. In fact, reputation loss is the company's biggest worry, followed by financial costs, system damage, and downtime.

So, what does all this mean?

It's not just about collecting data; it is also about how companies reduce risks and leverage and protect the data they have. GRC integrates data security, helping organizations be better prepared against unauthorized access, corruption, or theft.

Moreover, GRC tools can help elevate data security by controlling policies, regulations, and predictable issues within the organization.

When companies can't get or maintain customers because of a lack of trust, the organization's value will be significantly lower — or even zero. Unfortunately, this is even more true for small and medium size companies.

Many organizations have trouble managing their data, which, unfortunately, leads to poor decisions and a lack of trust from employees and customers.

Moreover, although companies know how costly wrong information is, many are not working on ensuring quality data through the right processes and controls. In fact, Harward Business Review said that 47% of newly created data records have at least one critical error.

Because there is a lack of focus on the right processes and systems that need to be in place to ensure quality data.

What do poor processes cause?

Fortunately, GRC's primary goal is to develop the right policies and procedures to ensure everyone in the organization appropriately manages the data.

GRC aims to create a data structure based on the proper governance that will dictate how people organize and handle the company's information. As a result, GRC will empower companies to be able to extract value from their data.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance allow organizations to understand the risks associated with data handling and guide managers to create and distribute the policies that will support any data-related activity.

The following are some of the ways GRC is used to achieve and maintain high-quality data:

Get a free consultation with StandardFusion to learn more about how GRC and data governance can boost your organization's value.

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