Everything an organization does should tie to one of three universal value drivers

Increase revenue and value
Manage cost and complexity
Support Risk Management and Compliance efforts, and increase confidence.

Data Governance efforts MUST tie back to one or more of these drivers. And YOU must communicate how it does.

Here are some of the ways a Data Governance effort can benefit you:

Increase revenue / value of assets

Improve the value of the company to those who would acquire it
Create “sellable” information products
Utilize information assets to make new sales
Utilize data to achieve new business capabilities
Better understand customers
Better understand product (and other) hierarchies

Reduce costs

Reduce duplicate data and its costs
Reduce duplicate data management processes (example: costs of data modeling, data administration, data quality)
Reduce likelihood of errors and associated costs (in software development, report development, information interpretation) due to lack of understanding of data or poor quality data

Support Compliance While Reducing Costs

Achieve compliance goals
Avoid cost of penalties associated with non-compliance
Avoidance of reputational hit (brand impact)
Avoid higher audit fees due to lack of confidence in “authoritative data”
Reduce management attestation/certification costs
Reduce costs of pre-audit testing

Support Impact Analysis

Increase ability to do useful impact analysis (by providing authoritative business rules, system of record information, and data lineage metadata)
Provide a capability to assess cross-functional impacts of data-related decisions

Help Align Efforts

Assist business teams (Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Security, and Privacy) to articulate their data-related business rules and requirements to IT, Architecture, and Data Management teams
Consider requirements and controls in an integrated fashion
Avoid “undoing” work or rendering controls invalid
Craft cross-functional accountabilities

Improve Data Repositories

Provide accountability and support for improving the quality of data in the repository so it can become an authoritative source of information
Reduce likelihood of architectural decisions that limit the organization’s ability to analyze its information
Increase ability to find authoritative information quickly

Improve Confidence in Data

Increase confidence in data-related decisions
Increase ability to make timely data-related decisions (this can affect time-to-market for projects and applications)
Increase confidence in data appearing in financial and management reports
Increase confidence in data strategy by providing a cross-functional team to weigh in on key decisions

It’s essential that Data Governance and Stewardship program facilitators avoid being “caught up” in politics. It’s our jobs to acknowledge the realities of the situations we work with, while avoiding taking sides or engaging in behaviors that could be perceived as favoring one set of data stakeholders at the expense of others.

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Data Quality

This type of program typically comes into existence because of issues around the quality, integrity, or usability of data. It may be sponsored by a Data Quality group or a business team that needs better quality data. (For example: Data Acquisition or Mergers &...

Data Governance Program Phases

As you perform the activities needed to gain support and funding, remember that your program may plan to address multiple focus areas. Each new effort should be introduced using the seven steps of the life cycle. Even specific governance-led projects, such as creating a set of data standards, will want to follow the Data Governance Life Cycle steps.

Governance Communications

At a Data Governance Conference in Orlando, Florida (USA), a group of managers of successful Data Governance programs reached a startling consensus: They agreed that Data Governance is actually somewhere between 80 and 95% communications!How can this be? They said...

Focus Areas for Data Governance

All Data Governance programs are not alike. Quite the contrary: programs can use the same framework, employ the same processes, and still appear very different. Why is this? It’s because of what the organization is trying to make decisions about or enforce rules for....

Governance and Alignment

Data Governance is a balancing act. On the one hand, you need to exert control over how groups create data, manage data, and use data. On the other hand, you need to promote appropriate levels of flexibility. You need to ensure that data-related efforts support the...

Defining Data Governance

How you define your program will influence your ability to manage it — to keep all participants on focus, in sync, and striving toward the same goals.

Governance and Decision-Making

Remember our (long) definition for Data Governance? “Data Governance is a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and...