“I just need a quick form to manage this survey,” says the manager.

They head over to the quickest, freest, form builder website and register for an account.

Within a few minutes and some drag and drop functionality, they build their form, hit publish, and send it out in an email—to a list of 5,000 people.

Piece of cake, done.

Within hours the manager is already getting some good feedback which is great. But pretty soon, the higher ups are asking more questions about what pricing plan those survey responders are currently using, or from which marketing campaign did they sign up.

“Okay, can be done, but will take a bit of time,” the manager’s thinking.

They’re going to have to export the responses to a CSV, do the same with the registration and marketing data, and then do some spreadsheet wizardry to map them together or import them into their BI software.

Chances are good that they’re going to run another survey next month, and that means doing all this work again. “I might need to hand this off to someone,” as the manager is thinking through the cumbersome work that’s ahead.

ALSO, did that freebie survey platform accommodate for privacy, PII, or GDRP requirements? They might want to check into that.

And that’s how IT begins.

What “IT” am I talking about?

I’m talking about the data siloing that naturally happens when teams are moving quickly to get their jobs done AND the manual work that goes along with processing that data.

As organizations grow, their data requirements becomes more sophisticated and require more governance around them. Why?

Never mind the potential privacy or PII concerns, but a one-off silo here and there might be okay, especially if your organization is small, but they tend to create painful problems down the road as individual business units continue to deploy transactional data processes without centralized coordination within a data architecture. What kinds of problems?

The Problems With Not Having A Data Governance Platform & Data Management Strategy:

• Data inconsistencies pop up across different systems that pollute analytics accuracy and hinder future integration efforts
• Complicates regulatory compliance requirements such as CCPA, GDPR, or others when data is not adhering to appropriate standards or lacks sufficient security oversight
• Data Integrations are non-existent or an afterthought which means spending more time tracking things down and processing that data for use, as described above
• Data gets misused, such as personal identifiable information (PII) is stored unsecured or in the wrong system
• Data errors can occur if the the intake methods (forms) do not implement consistent validation across their various uses

Why Having A Data Governance Platform Matters

A crucial goal of data governance is to break down data silos, like the one I just described above. That manager has now created a silo of customer survey data in a third-party platform that is completely disconnected from the rest of the organization’s data.

Over time and left unchecked, multiple silos of disparate data can build up which exacerbates manual processes that waste time and future integration headaches.

Having a data governance strategy and policy also ensures that data gets used properly. Business units are less likely to misuse personal information and fewer errors will occur in the data.

Data governance also insures data quality, beyond just avoiding errors. With a good data governance platform, you can ensure accurate analytics, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve the ease of access to other business units and analysts—all of which lowers costs.

Now, it’s possible to simply write down a policy that dictates how to handle various kinds of data, and that’s a good thing, but how do you enforce your data governance plan?

Enforcing Data Governance

A Chief Data Officer, Data Governance Management Teams, Data Governance Committees, and Data Stewards are all roles that large organizations will hire to help define, implement, and enforce data governance.

These are all good and will help an organization achieve a robust data management strategy, but what if you’re not at that level where you’re ready to hire a full data governance team? And even if you are, you still have to implement something that enables the centralized coordination that I mentioned above. How?

Let’s Start At The Beginning

In my scenario above, I described a manager who just need a form builder to create a form on a URL to send out a survey. Depending on what they’re responsible for, that may be all they will ever need.

But that’s not all the rest of the organization needs. Even if that manager, individually, doesn’t need the data they collect to interact with other data in the business, there may be other stakeholders in the business that do need that data. Therefore, that data needs to be accessible across the organization.

Let’s say this organization wants to let these managers and business units continue to build forms as they need, BUT they also want to let their in-house developers build forms AND have the flexibility to embed those forms into various tools without any hassle. In other words, it needs to be a form builder for developers too.

While they’re at it, those forms would better serve the organization if they could pre-populate data from other systems and send data to various systems (on premise, in the cloud, legacy, third-party, whatever), so it would be helpful if they had a form builder for developers with an API backend to easily handle all the integrations required, no matter their sources.

As time goes on, the organization wants to formalize everything into an app that handles all the internal business processes. This app is going to require a number of forms.

And as users begin to use the app, a lot of data is getting created, manipulated, copied, moved, updated, and so forth and it’s working. The next evolution is to build additional business process applications and ensure that all of them are managing the data in a centralized, coordinated way.

At the end of the day, the organizations needs a data governance platform that can handle any one of these scenarios that maintains data consistency, eliminates errors, conforms to regulations, and remains secure no matter the scope of its usage, across the whole enterprise:

A Data Governance Platform That Enforces Policy At The Intake

What better way is there to enforce data quality, formatting, rules, and routing than the moment the data is received?

This is why forms matter. A form is never just a form when they:

• Operate as the data model that is accepted within the organization
• Route data where it needs to go because they’re API driven
• Pre-populate data from existing systems because, again, they’re API driven
• Enforce formatting and quality policies with front and back end validation
• Adhere to security and compliance requirements when they’re embedded within your environment

Even if you don’t have a Chief Data Officer, Data Governance teams, or Data Stewards, the right data governance platform can ensure centralized, coordinated conformity across the organization.

This is what Form.io does.

And when it’s in place, all the data you’re receiving across your whole enterprise, no matter what you’re building, remains reliable, measurable, stored in-house, and capable of being routed to where it needs to go.

What about the scenario with the manager from the story at the beginning who just needs a one-off form?

Form.io handles that too. Non-developers can build a form with drag and drop and in one click have it publicly accessible and you’ll never have to worry about another data silo cropping up again.