What is data visibility, and why is it important?

Data visibility is a measure of how easily your organization can access, track, and view its data as it travels throughout your IT infrastructure. Achieving data visibility involves implementing a comprehensive approach to ensure your business can make well-informed decisions, plan ahead, and stay on the right side of compliance.

In this guide, we’ll explore how your organization can implement total data visibility. We’ll also touch on challenges and best practices for you to keep in mind. First, let’s examine some additional reasons why visibility of your data is so important. 

Data visibility in context

Businesses can no longer rely on folders and filing cabinets to track and store data in-house. Organizations today are pumping out unfathomable amounts of information. Cloud computing, artificial intelligence, IoT devices, and new applications all amount to one thing: a constant stream of big (and often unstructured) data for organizations to manage — day in, day out. 

And let’s not forget that this copious business data is precious — the new oil, as Clive Humby rightfully predicted in 2006 — valuable for agile business decision-making when used effectively but largely useless if left unrefined.

Without data, businesses can’t remain competitive and improve customer experiences. They’ll also struggle to meet compliance standards and uphold data protection. In short, data is crucial, and to really leverage it, businesses must have end-to-end visibility of where it lies. 

That’s where data visibility demonstrates its worth. Let’s dive into this topic and understand why having a bird's eye view of your data is so crucial. 

Why is data visibility important?

Complete data visibility is like piecing together a giant, 10,000-piece jigsaw.  In addition to improving decision-making and ensuring compliance, it also lays the foundation for future business expansion. Let’s expand on some of these benefits below. 

1. Agile decision-making

Data visibility provides a bird's eye view of your data, allowing IT specialists and leaders to analyze information in real time. This enhances agile decision-making, proactive resource allocation, and strategic planning. 

2. Enhanced operational efficiency

Continuous monitoring of data allows organizations to identify bottlenecks, failures, and trends proactively. This enables the organization to address issues early and boost overall operational efficiency. 

3. Increased data security and compliance

If a business doesn’t know where all of its data lies, how can it be sure its personally identifiable information (PII) is safe from internal and external threats? Data visibility allows a business to monitor data throughout its lifecycle, supporting security and compliance with frameworks like the GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. 

4. Improved data quality

A comprehensive business process for data visibility enables organizations to identify redundancies, inconsistencies, and gaps in datasets. This fosters data accuracy and reliability, fostering more accurate decision-making.  

5. Improved collaboration

Data visibility that spans departments breaks down siloed data stores. Teams can share insights and benefit from unified datasets, enabling a more creative, collaborative approach to problem-solving. 

6. Future-proofing

When a business understands its data assets, it’s much easier to transition to new technologies. For instance, well-organized data is a requirement for both cloud migration and the successful deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models.

In essence, data visibility is the key to maintaining efficiency within your current operation and planning for long-term growth. 

What are the key components of data visibility?

Now that you understand why data visibility matters, let’s examine how it works.

Effective data visibility consists of three core pillars: data lineage, data monitoring, and data access control. Let’s break down each. 

1. Data lineage

Data lineage involves tracing the origin, journey, and endpoint of data during its lifecycle. In short, it tracks data flow and ensures your organization knows where its data comes from, where it's going, where it will end up, and how it changes along the way. 

Ensuring data lineage is essential for data traceability. It’s also an important component of regulatory compliance — if you know where all of your sensitive data lies, you know exactly how to find it when it comes time for an audit. 

2. Data monitoring

Data monitoring involves the tracking of data quality and data health in real time. The goal of this component is to ensure data remains readily available and wholly accurate during its lifecycle. Data monitoring solutions can also help businesses recover more quickly from errors and breaches. 

3. Data access control

Access control is all about understanding who requires access to data, who is actually accessing data, and how they’re using that data. 

As you might expect, this is a crucial component of security and compliance. Without understanding data usage within your data catalog, you have no idea who can view or edit your sensitive information and therefore how to limit access to improve security. 

What are the challenges of data visibility?

Data visibility may be beneficial, but it's also difficult. If businesses are producing terabytes of data each day, how on earth can they hope to keep track? Here are three common challenges organizations face when they try to implement company-wide visibility. 

1. Data volume

The most obvious challenge to total data visibility is that there’s simply such a large volume of data to manage. The constant stream of information generated by IT environments can be overwhelming for organizations. Businesses must have the ability to handle large datasets efficiently if they hope to mitigate risks and make real-time data-driven decisions. 

2. Siloed data stores

If a business’ data catalog solely existed in one place, it’d be easy to monitor everything at once. But this isn’t the case. Modern business data is siloed across dozens of storage environments and systems, from on-premises services and cloud data to IoT devices and point-of-sale systems. This fragmentation means businesses need to first collate all of their data in one place before they can truly achieve visibility organization-wide. 

3. Complex data quality issues

Incomplete, inaccurate data can undermine visibility efforts, leading to distorted insights and misled decision-making. These data quality issues can arise in various ways, including human error and poor data standardization practices. Organizations must implement rigorous data validation processes and audits to facilitate accurate data collection and cleaning. 

If you’re interested in how your data visibility and governance practices rank, take our assessment.

10 data visibility use cases

All departments in all businesses in every industry can benefit from data visibility. It isn’t just limited to data science experts in high-tech organizations. Here are ten use cases to consider.

1. Sales pipeline transparency

With access to all of your data, you can gain real-time insights into sales stages and performance management, helping sales teams focus their efforts on high-priority leads. 

2. Regulatory compliance monitoring

Visibility makes it easier to adhere to regulations surrounding data privacy and security. This minimizes the risk of breaches and a loss of consumer trust. 

3. Marketing insights

The more customer data you have at your disposal, the easier it is to develop personalized campaigns that meet their needs. 

4. Supply chain optimization

Total data visibility means a 360-degree view of your supply chain, allowing you to track inventory levels, predict demand, and proactively address under and overstocking. 

5. Employee performance tracking

By monitoring KPIs and productivity levels, organizations can identify high performers as well as those that require additional support. 

6. Sensitive data security and privacy

Having complete knowledge of your entire data ecosystem makes implementing access controls, data encryption, and compliance measures more efficient. 

7. Patient care coordination

In the healthcare industry, data visibility allows providers to access real-time patient data across departments. This facilitates personalized care plans and more accurate care delivery. 

8. Fraud detection

In finance, a complete overview of data allows businesses to track transactions and detect suspicious activity proactively. 

9. Production line data monitoring

Data visibility lets manufacturing businesses monitor machine performance, predict maintenance, and optimize efficiency. 

10. Student performance tracking

In education, data visibility over student data, attendance, and grades can help identify at-risk students who require further support. 

In essence, if you handle any data at all, data visibility solutions can benefit you. They’ll streamline data management, support process automation, and unlock the value of your analytics. 

10 data visibility best practices 

Now that we’ve explored data visibility in full let’s run through how you can achieve it. Here are all of the best practices you should implement when developing your data visibility framework. 

1. Establish a centralized data repository

Create a unified data warehouse or data lake to consolidate your organizational data. A data management platform can help with this. 

2. Define data ownership roles

Create roles and responsibilities for data management. This ensures accountability for accuracy, integrity, and accessibility. 

3. Set out clear policies and procedures

Lay out clear policies to support achieving data visibility, integrity, data governance, and data security. This supports organization-wide standardization. 

4. Involve key stakeholders

Get stakeholders involved across all departments to ensure buy-in across the organization. Once again, this will help standardize your policies and procedures.

5. Conduct regular data audits

Carry out regular audits to identify potential issues with your quality data visibility approach. 

6. Utilize analytics tools

Implement advanced management tools that empower real-time analytics. This enables you to make agile, informed decisions using the data you possess.

7. Leverage data visualization tools

Similarly, take advantage of tools that allow you to visualize the data you possess. This transforms raw data into actionable insights. 

8. Train your teams

Invest in data literacy training for staff surrounding data visibility best practices. Your IT team, in particular, should be equipped with the skills to navigate large datasets. 

9. Utilize metadata management

Document metadata to provide context to the information you possess. Note data origin points, definitions, and usage, making it easier to find and understand. 

10. Implement security controls

Once your data is standardized and accessible, implement secure access controls based on user roles to keep sensitive information private and support data loss prevention.

Summing up 

Data visibility goes beyond a nice-to-have for businesses. It’s an essential consideration that facilitates compliance and ensures competitiveness in our data-dependent world. 

If you’d like to make data visibility a priority this year, RecordPoint can help. Our cloud-native data platform will unify all of your data under one roof—no matter where it resides. And you won’t need to move a thing. 

This gives you complete visibility and end-to-end governance over all of your data, making it easier to achieve compliance and use the data you possess to your advantage. Schedule a demo today to find out more. 

FAQs

What is the difference between data visibility and data discovery?

Data discovery involves exploring and identifying new structured and unstructured data sources to uncover previously unseen patterns. In contrast, data visibility ensures the availability of known data that is transparent and available for decision-making. In short, data visibility is about managing what is known; data discovery solutions involve discovering what is unknown. 

What tools can help me achieve better data visibility?

Aside from business intelligence (BI) and data observability tools, the primary platform that can help you achieve better data visibility is software focused on unifying all of your data under one roof. That’s the key to effective data visibility organization-wide. 

What is end-to-end data visibility?

End-to-end data visibility refers to the ability to track data throughout its lifecycle, from creation to data collection, data storage, data processing, and eventually data disposal or data retention. 

How does data visibility affect performance?

Data visibility positively impacts performance by offering faster, more informed decision-making. It’ll boost productivity and efficiency. Data visibility also makes it easier to plan for the future and scale up.