Data Governance: The Fundamentals are Broken

Authors:

Noreen Kendle
Principal Consulting Analyst

The world has transitioned from an industrial to an information age, where we have become extremely dependent on information along with the data on which it stands. With the rapid growth of technology, the world continues to move farther away from “hands-on” observation, operations, and management of the real world to utilizing the data representation of the real world. Our dependency on data has grown exponentially, while our ability to identify, understand, manage, and utilize data becomes more challenging over time. Despite all the thousands of tools and technologies marketed as “fixes” for the data issues, our data challenges continue to grow. Our growing data issues are only the symptom of the underlying problem – The fundamentals of data are broken.

In this report we have identified the broken data governance fundamentals and five basic steps organizations can take to address these broken fundamentals. These include: establishing the business to data connection; using a business blueprint; creating a data oversight framework; establishing an enterprise data construction practice; building the data asset management infrastructure; and, standing-up a data asset management practice focused on enterprise foundational data. In the end, if organizations do not fix the fundamentals, they will never be able to effectively clean, identify, integrate, manage, and utilize their data assets for even basic operations, let alone take advantage of the full power of those assets for true business intelligence, risk avoidance, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and data monetization. Information is truly powerful, but only if the data is right.