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: Management Alignment

This type of program typically comes into existence when managers find it difficult to make “routine” data-related management decisions because of their potential effect on operations or compliance efforts.Managers may realize they need to come together to make...

Assigning Data Ownership

One of the tenets of Data Governance is that enterprise data doesn’t “belong” to individuals. It is an asset that belongs to the enterprise. Still, it needs to be managed…

Working with Data Stewards

Approaches to Assigning Data Ownership and Stewardship Organizations can take multiple approaches to assigning Data Owners and Data Stewards for enterprise data. In doing so, they need to consider several factors and answer the following questions.Question #1: Should...

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Architecture, Integration

This type of program typically comes into existence in conjunction with a major system acquisition, development effort, or update that requires new levels of cross-functional decision-making and accountabilities.What other types of groups and initiatives might want...

Funding Models: Funding Data Governance

The DGI Data Governance Framework addresses funding two ways: Obtaining funding and support is a phase in the Data Governance Life Cycle Funding is part of one of the components of the framework. What type of funding is needed? Data Governance programs need to...

Starting a Data Governance Program

A successful Data Governance program does not begin with the design of the program! Before you start deciding who goes on what committee, you should be clear about your program’s value statement. You should have developed a roadmap to share with stakeholders. Those...

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...