Crushing the Data Governance Challenge

Data Governance often gets a bad rap and it’s easy to see why. The business looks at data governance as yet another layer of policies and procedures mandated by IT that make their job more difficult.  While it might be hard to clearly quantify the benefits of effective data governance, the consequences of poor data governance are more transparent.  Insufficient or non-existent data governance leads to serious technical and business problems such as overly complex and cumbersome information flows, lack of a single version of the truth, poor or misunderstood data quality, proliferation of tools and platforms, inconsistent data definitions and more.  We encountered one environment where our client had core revenue and cost information stored across four different systems (each with different, un-reconciled amounts), nine ETL tools, overlapping and redundant 3^rd party data providers, seven different database management systems, and 14 analytical tools.  And these were just the ones we discovered!  These issues ultimately lead to excessive costs and misinformed decision making.

Getting a data governance initiative off the ground starts with clearly defining the scope and objectives of the data governance organization and getting buy-in from top executives.  Data governance can encompass  many things, ranging from data quality all the way to maintaining the integrity of the enterprise information architecture.  It entails aspects of project management, architecture, data stewardship and data management, making it essential that the data governance boundaries be clearly defined.  This ensures that all aspects of information management are covered and responsibilities are not overlapping with other functions or groups.  And with clearly defined objectives, the progress of the data governance initiative can be measured and communicated to stakeholders.

With a charter that clearly defines objectives and scope, it’s time to establish executive support.  Reframing data governance in the context of high priority opportunities is the key to getting the right executive support from business and IT.  A data governance directive can be framed as an opportunity to simplify the IT environment, reduce costs, and strengthen decision making or mitigate business related risks that stem from information gaps and inaccuracies.  Risks vary from making poor decisions due to inaccurate data to litigation over non-compliance.  In fact, this is more of a business opportunity than a technical opportunity, and we would suggest that the business own your data governance initiative.

While there’s no silver bullet approach to implementing data governance, there are a few techniques that make these initiatives more likely to succeed:

• A well defined charter that is linked to pressing and agreed upon business issues (or underlying technological issues that are hurting business performance)
• Business ownership, or at a minimum, a high degree of business engagement
• Clearly establishing metrics or milestones based on the charter and using a phased approach allows the project to show progress and gain momentum
• Day to day leadership that drives pro-actively drives the governance agenda and takes accountability for the charter
• Executive engagement as part of the governance structure, meeting at least once a quarter
• Data stewards from the business and IT who are accountable for data quality and following governance procedures across all major data domains
• Carrots and sticks in place to follow governance procedures (e.g. employees reviews should have a governance component)

No doubt about it, data governance is hard.  Following  practical  techniques will help ensure a successful data governance organization is established, and the costly pitfalls of non-governance are avoided.

Tagged as: data, govern, governance, information, steward