By Andy Field, Senior Consultant

Imagine a large family with many teenagers and one car. It’s Friday night, the parents are out of town, and the teenagers have plans in different parts of the city.   On top of this, everyone is broke and the car is out of gas.   This situation has been coming up more and more over the last few years.   Over time some of the kids get jobs and buy their own cars, trucks, motorcycles to get around.   They don’t figure in the cost of insurance, repairs, maintenance, or parking.     In retrospect they realize they can’t afford to keep this up and some of the vehicles, especially the motorcycles, just don’t meet their needs when, say, the weather gets bad.

If you can envision this   then you have a pretty good idea of what occurs in many companies that have not implemented a data governance program.   There is no common data warehouse platform, let alone other shared data assets, costs are out of control and there is no room to grow. And there are no formal ways of making or delegating decisions. Things go from bad to worse.

What if the kids got together and met with their parents to lay out their transportation needs in advance?   They may figure out that if they had two cars and a truck, instead of one reliable car, an old clunker, a beat up pickup and two motorcycles that 90 percent of their needs would be met over the foreseeable future at half the cost.   The parents and kids could also lay out who is in charge in their absence and how conflicting needs are to be resolved and gas costs shared.   With the savings over the current situation some money could be put in a pot for a taxi or rental fund when there is an extraordinary need for transportation.

Hopefully you can appreciate what a sound data governance program can do for your company.   It may substantively end years of organizational friction, bringing with it the inherent benefits of a collaborative work environment while reducing costs and improving information accessibility and delivery for everyone to help address business opportunities. The question is: are you ready?

Data governance is an essential component of an overall Enterprise Information Management program.   It provides the forum and processes for making all significant organizational and policy decisions with respect to how data is managed in the enterprise.   It includes formalizing decision processes around privacy, security, and accessibility of corporate information. It enforces accountability at the business level, specifically among subject matter experts, key business users, and data stewards. And it sanctions standards around products, customers, and other master data.    

Data governance is difficult, often broad in scope, and requires a structured process to get right. Data governance is typically deployed incrementally to address issues that span functional, project and geographic boundaries.   For local decisions where the scope of the data decision will only impact one project the data decisions may be limited to a subset of data constituents (though sanctioned by the data governance council).   At the other end of the spectrum when decisions need to be made that may have serious consequences to the brand perception of the company (such as privacy policies)   then executive input is required to balance the perspectives of individuals directly representing this leadership such as legal (General Counsel), marketing (Vice President), operations (COO) and IT (CIO).

So if your company reminds you of the family described in this blog post there may be a better path to family harmony through the implementation of data governance.   Understanding that data governance can involve the whole ”family” with benefits for all who use information in their jobs is key to ensuring that the right constituents and scope are considered when planning its long-term deployment. Maybe 2010 is the year you’ll get started. Good luck on your journey!

photo by brightroyalty via Flickr (Creative Commons License)