Looking at Data Governance

We’ve all known it for many years and history has demonstrated over and over again:
data is the force behind any successful business. How an organization uses its data can be the difference between average performance and competitive advantage. For this reason, it is vital to have a data management strategy that focuses on the creation of accurate, consistent and transparent data content that can be integrated into the business applications and business processes.

Over the past weeks, we have been asking the following questions of a number of CIO’s and CFO’s at large local businesses: who “owns” the data within your enterprise? Who makes sure it’s accurate? Who makes sure it’s available for use at any time?

The answers weren’t all that surprising. Most often people nobody really “owns” most of the data. The CFO’s appeared to want to “own” the financial data – that which is represented in their formal filings. Data ownership in other parts of the business, like production, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, seems to flounder somewhat. But the one thing we heard most often – “data ownership is NOT the responsibility of the CIO”.

So if data is the force behind successful businesses, wouldn't it be important to have the owners of the data know they own it and give them the tools to make sure they are successful? We think having Data Governance is an important step in managing data. But that Data Governance is only one piece of a much larger program required to properly manage enterprise data. And how do you create an enterprise data management program?

We think it starts by looking at enterprise data in a holistic manner. Have a data strategy. Work through the data governance models. Look at all the different types of data and how it is used and why it's so important to your organization.

We have built a comprehensive Enterprise Data Management framework that we use this to look at and evaluate where a company is with their environment and how they can use process, people, and technology to address data. More on that over the next few posts.