What data-confident organizations do differently

Five core strategies are common among organizations tackling silos effectively:

Establish shared definitions and metadata standards across departments to ensure consistent understanding
Implement federated stewardship models that give teams ownership of their data domains while following enterprise standards
Automate data discovery and access controls to reduce manual effort and increase responsiveness
Govern data in place with system-agnostic frameworks that don’t rely on relocating or reformatting data
Track lineage and usage across systems to build trust, support compliance and improve context for decision-making

What is ‘governing in place’?

Instead of physically moving data into a central system, high-confidence organizations logically apply governance policies directly to the systems where data already lives. This avoids duplication, maintains flexibility and supports federated control.

To increase data confidence, leading organizations are shifting how they approach governance. 60% of professionals surveyed report high confidence in their organization’s data use, quality and governance — leaving 40% still operating with hesitation, uncertainty or outright distrust.

In this report, we use those with the highest levels of data confidence as a best-in-class benchmark to understand what they’re doing differently and how their strategies translate into a measurable business advantage.

This group isn’t just more confident — they’re more capable. They’re over twice as likely to have unified data governance across all departments compared to those with lower confidence (73% vs 33%). That level of customization enables more flexible, cross-functional collaboration and control.

Rather than letting disparate teams create disjointed policies, standards and controls, this group is unifying governance across all platforms, teams and data sources — without forcing data to move or teams to give up flexibility.