Tag: five pillars of data governance

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Five Pillars of Data Governance Readiness: Delivery Capability

The five pillars of data governance readiness should be the starting point for implementing or revamping any DG initiative.

In a recent CSO Magazine article, “Why data governance should be corporate policy,” the author states: “Data is like water, and water is a fundamental resource for life, so data is an essential resource for the business. Data governance ensures this resource is protected and managed correctly enabling us to meet our customer’s expectations.”

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the five pillars of data governance (DG) readiness, and this week we turn our attention to the fifth and final pillar, delivery capability.

Together, the five pillars of data governance readiness work as a step-by-step guide to a successful DG implementation and ongoing initiative.

As a refresher, the first four pillars are:

  1. The starting point is garnering initiative sponsorship from executives, before fostering support from the wider organization.

 

  1. Organizations should then appoint a dedicated team to oversee and manage the initiative. Although DG is an organization-wide strategic initiative, it needs experience and leadership to guide it.

 

  1. Once the above pillars are accounted for, the next step is to understand how data governance fits with the wider data management suite so that all components of a data strategy work together for maximum benefits.

 

  1. And then enterprise data management methodology as a plan of action to assemble the necessary tools.

Once you’ve completed these steps, how do you go about picking the right solution for enterprise-wide data governance?

Five Pillars of Data Governance: Delivery Capability – What’s the Right Solution?

Many organizations don’t think about enterprise data governance technologies when they begin a data governance initiative. They believe that using some general-purpose tool suite like those from Microsoft can support their DG initiative. That’s simply not the case.

Selecting the proper data governance solution should be part of developing the data governance initiative’s technical requirements. However, the first thing to understand is that the “right” solution is subjective.

Data stewards work with metadata rather than data 80 percent of the time. As a result, successful and sustainable data governance initiatives are supported by a full-scale, enterprise-grade metadata management tool.

Additionally, many organizations haven’t implemented data quality products when they begin a DG initiative. Product selections, including those for data quality management, should be based on the organization’s business goals, its current state of data quality and enterprise data management, and best practices as promoted by the data quality management team.

If your organization doesn’t have an existing data quality management product, a data governance initiative can support the need for data quality and the eventual evaluation and selection of the proper data quality management product.

Enterprise data modeling is also important. A component of enterprise data architecture, it’s an enabling force in the performance of data management and successful data governance. Having the capability to manage data architecture and data modeling with the optimal products can have a positive effect on DG by providing the initiative architectural support for the policies, practices, standards and processes that data governance creates.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the lack of a formal data governance team/unit has been cited as a leading cause of DG failure. Having the capability to manage all data governance and data stewardship activities has a positive effect.

Shopping for Data Governance Technology

DG is part of a larger data puzzle. Although it’s a key enabler of data-driven business, it’s only effective in the context of the data management suite in which it belongs.

Therefore when shopping for a data governance solution, organizations should look for DG tools that unify critical data governance domains, leverage role-appropriate interfaces to bring together stakeholders and processes to support a culture committed to acknowledging data as the mission-critical asset that it is, and orchestrate the key mechanisms required to discover, fully understand, actively govern and effectively socialize and align data to the business.

Data Governance Readiness: Delivery Capability

Here’s an initial checklist of questions to ask in your evaluation of a DG solution. Does it support:

  • Relational, unstructured, on-premise and cloud data?
  • Business-friendly environment to build business glossaries with taxonomies of data standards?
  • Unified capabilities to integrate business glossaries, data dictionaries and reference data, data quality metrics, business rules and data usage policies?
  • Regulating data and managing data collaboration through assigned roles, business rules and responsibilities, and defined governance processes and workflows?
  • Viewing data dashboards, KPIs and more via configurable role-based interfaces?
  • Providing key integrations with enterprise architecture, business process modeling/management and data modeling?
  • A SaaS model for rapid deployment and low TCO?

To assess your data governance readiness, especially with the General Data Protection Regulation about to take effect, click here.

You also can try erwin DG for free. Click here to start your free trial.

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Five Pillars of Data Governance Readiness: Team Resources

The Facebook scandal has highlighted the need for organizations to understand and apply the five pillars of data governance readiness.

All eyes were on Mark Zuckerberg this week as he testified before the U.S. Senate and Congress on Facebook’s recent data drama.

A statement from Facebook indicates that the data snare was created due to permission settings leveraged by the Facebook-linked third-party app ‘thisisyourdigitallife.’

Although the method used by Cambridge Analytica to amass personal data from 87 million Facebook users didn’t constitute a “data breach,” it’s still a major data governance (DG) issue that is now creating more than a headache for the company.

The #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining momentum, not to mention the company’s stock dip.

With Facebook’s DG woes a mainstay in global news cycles, and the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) implementation just around the corner, organizations need to get DG-ready.

During the past few weeks, the erwin Expert Blog has been exploring the five pillars of data governance readiness. So far, we’ve covered initiative sponsorship and organizational support. Today, we talk team resources.

Facebook and the Data Governance Awakening

Most organizations lack the enterprise-level experience required to advance a data governance initiative.

This function may be called by another name (e.g., data management, information management, enterprise data management, etc.), a successful organization recognizes the need for managing data as an enterprise asset.

Data governance, as a foundational component of enterprise data management, would reside within such a group.

You would think an organization like Facebook would have this covered. However, it doesn’t appear that they did.

The reason Facebook is in hot water is because the platform allowed ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ to capture personal data from the Facebook friends of those who used the app, increasing the scope of the data snare by an order of magnitude.

Pillars of Data Governance; Facebook

For context, it took only 53 Australian ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ users to capture 310,000 Australian citizens’ data.

Facebook’s permission settings essentially enabled ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ users to consent on behalf of their friends. Had GDPR been in effect, Facebook would have been non-compliant.

Even so, the extent of the PR fallout demonstrates that regulatory compliance shouldn’t be the only driver for implementing data governance.

Understanding who has access to data and what that data can be used for is a key use case for data governance. This considered, it’s not difficult to imagine how a more robust DG program could have covered Facebook’s back.

Data governance is concerned with units of data – what are they used for, what are the associated risks, and what value do they have to the business? In addition, DG asks who is responsible for the data – who has access? And what is the data lineage?

It acts as the filter that makes data more discoverable to those who need it, while shutting out those without the required permissions.

The Five Pillars of Data Governance: #3 Team Resources

Data governance can’t be executed as a short-term fix. It must be an on-going, strategic initiative that the entire organization supports and is part of. But ideally, a fixed and formal data management group needs to oversee it.

As such, we consider team resources one of the key pillars of data governance readiness.

Data governance requires leadership with experience to ensure the initiative is a value-adding success, not the stifled, siloed programs associated with data governance of old (Data Governance 1.0).

Without experienced leadership, different arms of the organization will likely pull in different directions, undermining the uniformity of data that DG aims to introduce. If such experience doesn’t exist within the organization, then outside consultants should be tapped for their expertise.

As the main technical enabler of the practice, IT should be a key DG participant and even house the afore-mentioned data management group to oversee it. The key word here is “participant,” as the inclination to leave data governance to IT and IT alone has been a common reason for Data Governance 1.0’s struggles.

With good leadership, organizations can implement Data Governance 2.0: the collaborative, outcome-driven approach more suited to the data-driven business landscape. DG 2.0 avoids the pitfalls of its predecessor by expanding the practice beyond IT and traditional data stewards to make it an enterprise-wide responsibility.

By approaching data governance in this manner, organizations ensure those with a stake in data quality (e.g., anyone who uses data) are involved in its discovery, understanding, governance and socialization.

This leads to data with greater context, accuracy and trust. It also hastens decision-making and times to market, resulting in fewer bottlenecks in data analysis.

We refer to this collaborative approach to data governance as the enterprise data governance experience (EDGE).

Back to Facebook. If they had a more robust data governance program, the company could have discovered the data snare exploited by Cambridge Analytica and circumvented the entire scandal (and all its consequences).

But for data governance to be successful, organizations must consider team resources as well as enterprise data management methodology and delivery capability (we’ll cover the latter two in the coming weeks).

To determine your organization’s current state of data governance readiness, take the erwin DG RediChek.

To learn more about how to leverage data governance for GDPR compliance and an EDGE on the competition, click here.

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Five Pillars of Data Governance Readiness: Organizational Support

It’s important that business leaders foster organizational support for their data governance efforts.

The clock is counting down to the May 25 effective date for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With the deadline just a stone’s throw away, organizations need to ensure they are data governance-ready.

We’re continuing our blog series on the Five Pillars of Data Governance (DG). Today, we’ll explore the second pillar of data governance, organizational support, and why it’s essential to ensuring DG success.

In the modern, data-driven business world, data is an organization’s most valuable asset, and successful organizations treat it as such. In this respect, we can see data governance as a form of asset maintenance.

Take a production line in a manufacturing facility, for example. Organizations understand that equipment maintenance is an important and on-going process. They require employees using the equipment to be properly trained, ensuring it is clean, safe and working accordingly with no misuse.

They do this because they know that maintenance can prevent, or at the very least postpone repair that can be costly and lead to lost revenue during downtime.

Organizational Support: Production Lines of Information

Data Governance: Organizational Support

Despite the intangible nature of data, the same ideas for maintaining physical assets can and should be applied. After all, data-driven businesses are essentially data production lines of information. Data is created and moved through the pipeline/organization, eventually driving revenue.

In that respect – as with machinery on a production line and those who use it – everybody that uses data should be involved in maintaining and governing it.

Poor data governance leads to similar problems as poor maintenance of a production line. If it’s not well-kept, the fallout can permeate throughout the whole business.

If a DG initiative is failing, data discovery becomes more difficult, slowing down data’s journey through the pipeline.

Inconsistencies in a business glossary lead to data units with poor or no context. This in turn leads to data units that the relevant users don’t know how to put together to create information worth using.

Additionally, and perhaps most damning, if an organization has poorly managed systems of permissions, the wrong people can access data. This could lead to unapproved changes, or in light of GDPR, serious fines – and ultimately diminished customer trust, falling stock prices and tarnished brands.

Facebook has provided a timely reminder of the importance of data governance and the potential scale of fallout should its importance be understated. Facebook’s lack of understanding as to how third-party vendors could use and were using its data landed them in hot PR water (to put it lightly).

Reports indicate 50 million users were affected, and although this is nowhere near the biggest leak in history (or even in recent history, see: Equifax), it’s proof that the reputational damage of a data breach is extensive. And with GDPR fast approaching, that cost will only escalate.

At the very least, organization’s need to demonstrate that they’ve taken the necessary steps to prevent such breaches. This requires understanding what data they currently have, where it is, and also how it may be used by any third parties with access. This is where data governance comes in, but for it to work, many organizations need a culture change.

A Change in Culture

Fostering organizational support for data governance might require a change in organizational culture.

This is especially apparent in organizations that have only adopted the Data Governance 1.0 approach in which DG is siloed from the wider organization and viewed as an “IT-problem.” Such an approach denies data governance initiatives the business contexts needed to function in a data-driven organization.

Data governance is based primarily on three bodies of knowledge: the data dictionary, business glossary and data usage catalog. For these three bodies of knowledge to be complete, they need input from the wider business.

In fact, countless past cases of failed DG implementations can be attributed to organizations lacking organizational support for data governance.

For example, leaving IT to document and assemble a business glossary naturally leads to inconsistencies. In this case, IT departments are tasked with creating a business glossary for terms they often aren’t aware of, don’t understand the context of, or don’t recognize the applications or implications for.

This approach preemptively dooms the initiative, ruling out the value-adding benefits of mature data governance initiatives from the onset.

In erwin’s 2018 State of Data Governance Report, it found that IT departments continue to foot the bill for data governance at 40% of organizations. Budget for data governance comes from the audit and compliance function at 20% of organizations, while the business covers the bill at just 8% of the companies surveyed.

To avoid the aforementioned pitfalls, business leaders need to instill a culture of data governance throughout the organization. This means viewing DG as a strategic initiative and investing in it with inherent organizational and financial support as an on-going practice.

To that end, organizations tend to overvalue the things that can be measured and undervalue the things that cannot. Most organizations want to quantify the value of data governance. As part of a culture shift, organizations should develop a business case for an enterprise data governance initiative that includes calculations for ROI.

By limiting its investment to departmental budgets, data governance must contend with other departmental priorities. As a long-term initiative, it often will lose out to short-term gains.

Of course, this means business leaders need to be heavily invested and involved in data governance themselves – a pillar of data governance readiness in its own right.

Ideally, organizations should implement a collaborative data governance solution to facilitate the organization-wide effort needed to make DG work.

Collaborative in the sense of enabling inter-departmental collaboration so the whole organization’s data assets can be accounted for, but also  in the sense that it works with the other tools that make data governance effective and sustainable – e.g., enterprise architecture, data modeling and business process.

We call this all-encompassing approach to DG an ‘enterprise data governance experience’ or ‘EDGE.’ It’s the Data Governance 2.0 approach, made to reflect how data can be used within the modern enterprise for greater control, context, collaboration and value creation.

To determine your organization’s current state of data governance readiness, take the erwin DG RediChek.

To learn more about the erwin EDGE, reserve your seat for this webinar.

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Data Governance Readiness: The Five Pillars

In light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect in just three months, an understanding of data governance readiness has become paramount. Organizations need to make sure they’re ready to meet the world’s most comprehensive data privacy law’s requirements:

  • Understanding all the systems in which personal data is located and all the interactions that touch it
  • Knowing the original instance of the data plus its entire lineage and how it’s handled across the complete ecosystem
  • Ensuring changes, purges or other customer requests are adhered to in a timely manner
  • Notifying customers of a data breach within 72 hours

GDPR becomes effective in an age of rapidly proliferating customer data. For organizations to meet its demands, data governance (DG) must become operational. Done right, it holds great promise not only for regulatory compliance but also for creating data-driven opportunities that drive innovation and greater value.

The 2018 State of Data Governance Report shows that customer trust/satisfaction, decision-making, reputation management, analytics and Big Data are the key drivers of data governance adoption, behind meeting regulatory obligations.

Data Governance Readiness: Data Governance Drivers

A Question of Approach

There’s no question data governance is important and should be the cornerstone of data management to both reduce risks and realize larger organizational results, such as increasing customer satisfaction, improving decision-making, enhancing operational efficiency and growing revenue. The question is how to implement DG, so it does all that.

The boom in data-driven business, as well as new regulatory pressures, have thrust DG into a new spotlight. But the historical approach to DG, being housed in IT siloed from the parties who could use it the most, won’t work in the age of digital power brands like Airbnb, Amazon and Uber.

Data governance done right requires the participation of the entire enterprise and should be measured and measurable in the context of the business. Fortunately, Data Governance 2.0 builds on the principle that everyone in the organization has a role in the initiative, which is ongoing.

IT handles the technical mechanics of data management, but data governance is everyone’s business with stakeholders outside IT responsible for aligning DG with strategic organizational goals.

This creates an environment in which data is treated as an organizational asset that must be inventoried and protected as any physical asset, but it also can be understood in context and shared to unleash greater potential.

The Pillars of Data Governance Readiness

If you accept that data governance is a must for understanding critical data within a business context, tracking its physical existence and lineage, and maximizing its security, quality and value, are you ready to implement it as an enterprise initiative?

We’ve identified what we believe to be the five pillars of data governance readiness.

  1. Initiative Sponsorship

Without executive sponsorship, you’ll have difficulty obtaining the funding, resources, support and alignment necessary for successful DG. 

  1. Organizational Support

DG needs to be integrated into the data stewardship teams and wider culture. It also requires funding.

  1. Team Resources

Most successful organizations have established a formal data management group at the enterprise level. As a foundational component of enterprise data management, DG would reside in such a group.

  1. Enterprise Data Management Methodology

DG is foundational to enterprise data management. Without the other essential components (e.g., metadata management, enterprise data architecture, data quality management), DG will be struggle.

  1. Delivery Capability

Successful and sustainable DG initiatives are supported by specialized tools, which are scoped as part of the DG initiative’s technical requirements.

We’re going to explore these pillars of data governance readiness in future blog posts and through a new, free app to help you build – or shore up – your data governance initiative. By applying them, you’ll establish a solid data governance foundation to achieve the desired outcomes, from limiting the risk of data exposures to growing revenue.

In the meantime, you might want to check out our latest white paper that focuses on the impending GDPR and how to increase DG expertise because no organization with even one customer in the EU is outside its grasp. Click here to get the white paper.

Data Governance and GDPR: GDPR and Your Business Whitepaper