Pillars to GDPR Success (4 of 5): Self-Service Curation and Certification

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), applicable to citizens of the EU, requires organizations to place a new emphasis on data accountability. Therefore, the fourth pillar of GDPR compliance in our 5 Pillars of GDPR Compliance philosophy is self-service curation and certification.

This pillar, or stage of the compliance process, is about getting the right experts to become accountable for each type of data within a company.

The Importance of Fostering Accountability for Data Protection

Data protection officers, data scientists, data engineers, or information architects are typically the major players in data processing, and they play the largest roles in overall GDPR compliance. However, when curating processed data, those key stakeholders are not always the ones that knows the data best. For example, if a particular set of data is largely used for sales, a sales admin might be the best person to curate that data.

By fostering accountability across different teams, all protected data that will be used by the company becomes better, more useful, and more meaningful.

As data is passed from one team to the next—and entered into a data preparation and stewardship platform—it will naturally go through a governed human intervention process. This process aims to identify and eliminate compliance risks and inaccuracies. Since each team member trusts the expertise of the team member before him or her, he or she can be sure that the process is a trusted system and that the data in front of them is of the highest quality. In addition, each and every action on data can be tracked for auditing, data lineage, and compliance reporting purposes.

Furthermore, each team member who looks over the data is solely responsible for the outcome of that data, and will therefore perform at the top of his or her abilities.

The Company’s Role in Fostering Accountability for Data Accuracy

The human component of a GDPR compliance project goes well beyond hiring a Data Protection Officer and training employees on the basics of GDPR, organizations need to boost a data-driven culture. Once personal data is under control with a single point of access to data, the people that know the data best can engage for perfect and compliant data. 

Traditional centralized approaches—where data management and data governance is only accessible to a happy few—can no longer keep up in today’s data-driven era, where large volumes of data come from everywhere, in real time. Organizations need to create a culture of accountability, by empowering a large number of employees with intuitive tools to avoid data bottlenecks, inaccuracies, and security breaches.

A Simple Platform for Self-Service Curation

The good news is a company does not need a separate, data scientist–approved platform. It just needs a single, unified platform that also empowers employees without a developer’s skill set to easily access and input data.

Talend Data Preparation helps companies put the right tools into the hands of the right people, while Talend Data Stewardship allows users to orchestrate workflow-based approaches for data validation and data remediation. Each team member can be assigned different levels of access, data domains, and tasks across the platform, eliminating confusion as well as the risk of sharing personal data in an uncontrolled way.

Get Started with Self-Service Curation and Certification for GDPR

Big data has become more and more important for businesses in almost any industry over the past decade, and, now, the GDPR has increased the stakes for proper data governance and compliance. Creating a culture of accountability is the first step, but it goes hand-in-hand with a well-equipped team.

When you’re ready to begin implementing self-service curation and fostering accountability for data protection, Talend’s Data Preparation tool is the best place to start. If you’re still in the early stages of GDPR compliance, the 5 Pillars of GDPR Compliance webinar will give you all of the information you need.

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