Organizations without data governance rules occasionally find themselves imitating the “Confused Travolta” meme when employees move on or contractor services are discontinued.
Why is that you ask? Well, in the case of Google Data Studio, when visual dashboards that once were shared in weekly/monthly/quarterly meetings that decide the trajectory of business decisions suddenly go missing, no one immediately knows why or what to do to get it back. This in turn can delay critical, time-sensitive business decisions that need to be made.
Additionally, if the dashboard owner (who has recently left the organization for any reason) can no longer be reached and transfer ownership, the dashboard must be recreated. This has the potential to be problematic if the dashboard was originally created by an outside entity or there are no qualified active employees able to complete the task at hand. Delays like this can cause more than lost assets and money—but lost opportunities as well.
So, why did this unfortunate situation occur? Simple: the short answer is poor data governance.
And, what can we do to prevent this from happening to your organization with regards to Google Data Studio dashboards? Follow these simple steps:
- Implement a data governance document and familiarize the team. You can also read a great article from our team on that topic with regards to the Great Resignation and how to safeguard your organization and data from migrating team members.
- Use a dashboard-specific, company-email to assign as the owner of all Data Studio dashboards while assigning editing and viewer permissions to the appropriate team members.
- Make sure that if you are working with third-party contracting services that the creators are assigning ownership to that dashboard-specific, company-email and editing permissions and viewing permissions are only granted to active employees and third parties you are actively working with. Upon completion of that third-party contract, user access should be removed in Data Studio as well as in Google Analytics for data privacy concerns.
- Just like third-party contracting services, employees who leave the organization should have privileges revoked in all data sensitive areas like Data Studio and Google Analytics. This should be a part of your employee off-boarding procedures and if not done, legal repercussions could ensue from bad actors.
With legal concerns over data privacy and many organizations making daily decisions based on data captured via the many analytics tools in the market like Google’s Data Studio, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore these simple but critical data governance procedures. So avoid the “Confused Travolta” meme and opt for the “Success Kid” meme when building those company owned dashboard collections.
For more information on how to protect yourself from the threat of data loss or help with data governance from a team armed with the tools to increase your probability of success, contact our InfoTrust team or read more about data governance here.
