Enterprise Data Governance – How Established Is It in the Marketplace?

Intelligent  Business  Strategies  Enterprise Data Governance - How Established Is It in the Marketplace? By Mike Ferguson Intelligent Business Strategies December 2008 Prepared for: Enterprise Data Governance Survey Table of Contents Management Summary ........................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 4 Enterprise Data Governance ............................................................................................... 5 Key Requirements for Enterprise Data Governance .................................................... 5 Data Governance - The Business Case ................................................................................. 7 Why Implement Data Governance? .................................................................................... 7 Importance Of Data Governance To Business .................................................................... 7 Drivers ................................................................................................................................. 8 Funding ............................................................................................................................... 9 Data Governance – Scope .................................................................................................... 11 Data Governance – People ................................................................................................... 12 Data Governance – Process ................................................................................................. 15 Data Governance - Technology ............................................................................................ 17 Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 19 Copyright © Intelligent Business Strategies 2 Enterprise Data Governance Survey MANAGEMENT SUMMARY Data governance is In 2008, over 500 participants completed an online data governance high priority business questionnaire designed to gauge the relative maturity level of companies as they led initiative investigate or implement data governance programs. The survey research validated that enterprise data governance is seen as high priority in the majority of companies who participated. It is also primarily a business led initiative that Trusted business is still in its early stages. It is being driven by business demand for trusted intelligence, compliance and risk business intelligence, compliance and risk mitigation instead of the normal management are the incentive of improvements in commercial profitability. main business drivers It was also found that over half of the companies showing interest in data governance have already received sponsorship for their programs. However, funding for these programs is being sought under the guise of other initiatives such as larger data management and business intelligence (BI)/data warehousing Sponsorship is programs or as part of master data management (MDM) projects as opposed to a forthcoming but funding is happening stand-alone data governance program. In terms of data that businesses are under the guise of seeking to govern, the focus is on structured data rather than unstructured data. other initiatives Customer, product and financial data are especially seen as high priorities. Companies are not yet In terms of implementation, organisational structure is still not well established. fully organised to Many companies have data stewards spread across their business units but they tackle the problem are only undertaking their data stewardship duties on an ad hoc or part time basis. Frameworks, policies and processes for data stewards are not in place. And less than a quarter of the companies surveyed responded that they have a data governance council in place to approve new data attributes or decommission Data governance data. The survey also found the establishment of data governance processes and standards, policies and policies is still in its early stages with around 25% of companies having these in processes are being established in some place. A slightly higher percentage of companies already have software in place companies but others to get them started on a data governance program but these tools are generally still have to do this stand-alone products rather than being part of an integrated suite of tools. Data governance is Finally even though the scope of data governance projects is restricted to a being implemented in specific type of data (e.g. customer) there is clear evidence that data governance departments and lines initiatives are still only being undertaken in specific departmental or line of of business but it has business areas rather than being tackled on an enterprise-wide basis. The to be driven enterprise wide to get critical data problem with this approach is that customer data for example (which was flagged under control as the highest priority by respondents participating in this survey) may appear in several data systems - front office CRM (sales, marketing and service), finance and in distribution. These systems are found in different departments and may often span several lines of business. The same is true for product data. If customer and product data is to be brought under control, doing so in one department or one line of business is not enough. This vision must be across the enterprise. Companies also need to establish strong backing from enterprise level executives if they are to drive an enterprise-wide data governance program. Copyright © Intelligent Business Strategies 3 Enterprise Data Governance Survey INTRODUCTION Significant numbers Over the last few years, the number of catastrophic corporate failures in large of catastrophic companies has increased rapidly. Names like Worldcom, Enron and Parmalat corporate failures dominated the news cycles. More recently banks and financial institutions have have been occurring suffered failures. The sheer number of delinquent mortgages and loans that has in recent times triggered these failures indicates an abundant lack of understanding of customer level risk management in the banking sector. This is especially the case for customers in possession of multiple loan products. Regulatory and To counter this, cross industry and industry-specific compliance initiatives are legislative being introduced through legislation and regulatory bodies. These compliance compliance has been initiatives range from tougher, fully auditable accounting practices to introduced to implementing specific practices for things like anti-money laundering and increase the quality of business practices information security. The main reason most of these initiatives have been introduced is to increase the quality of business by raising the bar on business practice standards. In light of the most recent set of corporate failures there is no doubt that more regulation and legislation is on its way to force that bar to be raised even higher. Trusted data is Almost all of these compliance initiatives rely on one thing - data. Moreover, that fundamental to data must be secure, correct, complete and trusted to avoid the heavy financial compliance and the penalties and prosecutions that can be triggered if it is proven to be wrong avoidance of penalties One of the problems businesses face with these regulations is that the data needed for monitoring and regulatory reporting may have been created and stored in many different systems across the enterprise. This data may be housed in files and databases in multiple operational systems, in data warehousing systems and even in multiple desktop documents such as spreadsheets. Data in these systems could have been created in a number of ways.