Data Governance

Data governance refers to the quality management of an organisations information; monitoring, measuring and improving data right across the enterprise.

Data - whether about customers, suppliers, finances or inventory items - is at the foundation of all business decisions. Sound data is critical to the success of informed business decisions.

Achieving data quality is a shared responsibility of both the business and IT, from executive management to data analysts and data stewards.

Data Governance is not a one time activity - it requires a sustained effort to monitor, measure and improve data throughout the enterprise. Only with a solid data governance process can the business truley have confidence in their information - and an auditable trail that objectively demonstrates its accuracy.

Data Governance Principles

Data governance is based on principles that data has to be:

Secure - across multiple access channels - corporate lan, wan, web, mobile
Accessible - timely to meet decision requirements
Consistent - across applications
Understood - by business users
Managed - through people, processes and procedures.

You cannot govern what you do not understand, understanding the data is the first, necessary step in securing it, making it consistent and accessible, and managing it.

Data Quality Tools

Data quality solutions are available to support data governance initiatives. These must be capable of:

Automatically monitoring the compliance of data streaming from distributed locations, such as call centres, websites and field offices.
Track data conformance over time to understand the impact on report accuracy and decision-making
Compare third-party data and identify unexpected changes, preventing chaos in operational systems
Provide a single data platform for managing data governance operations, controlling information assets and forming decisions for continued growth.

SOA and Data Governance

Service-oriented architecture [SOA] is fast becoming the de facto standard for designing and creating reusable business rules and logic that can be shared across distributed enterprise platforms.

Well-executed SOA implementations help bridge the gap between enterprise architecture and business strategy. This is facilitating a closer alignment of IT and the business, whilst implementing the robust reuse of existing technology and application code with unprecedented agility and cost effectiveness.

However, too often, raw and undocumented SOA services emerge from several, independent projects, each charted to solve mutually exclusive business problems.

An enterprise that fails to realize the importance of an effective SOA governance structure will also fail to greatly benefit from SOA.

Read More on Data Governance In SOA

Corporate Messaging Data Governance

For most organizations, email messaging is the primary means of communication and sharing corporate information.

Challenges of exploding volumes of email content, spam, and electronic mail abuse, the challenges in email messaging infrastructures are seemgingly insurmountable.

Email governance has raised visibility of this issue, but all too often, resolutions fail to properly define authoritative rules for corporate archiving records.

Regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, highlight the need for more attention to the issues surrounding email.

Collectively addressing email governance issues and being proactive in addressing retention policies is a major undertaking, and often at the cost of more seemingly strategic technology projects.

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