Effective governance also enables a company to implement and manage internal policies and standards related to data security and use. This not only aids the company’s response to external compliance directives, but also standardizes data for use throughout the company. Normalized data provides the “single source of truth” needed for critical business decisions, as well as the data quality and reliability teams need to do their jobs.
Data governance challenges
On the surface, implementing data governance may seem obvious and simple, but the act of managing data across a company’s teams and products presents a level of complexity that many companies strive to tackle. or avoid it altogether.
Instilling governance processes, policies, and safeguards requires new thinking about people, processes, and technology. “It’s not the execution-time activities that convince someone not to do administrative work,” Syed said. “That’s all the work needed to set up the administration.”
For many people, the approach to data governance is to establish policies that are monitored by individual parts of the business, which makes implementation more difficult. “Think of all the different groups doing that in a large organization,” Syed explains. “They all have to do that dependency checking, and each team is also doing separate development work to meet those requirements, which is a lot of effort.”
An established data governance initiative that requires each team to monitor its own data dependencies also takes time and effort compared to other work. “Innovation becomes cumbersome because at each innovation step you have to check whether there is a dependency on your governance policies,” Syed said.
Siled approaches are also subject to error and make it more difficult to ensure that all governance policies are consistently followed, in all cases. These barriers can lead to a lack of employee and stakeholder support, undermining any real data governance benefits.
An integrated governance solution
In many companies, data is viewed as an IT asset and therefore an IT responsibility. While that may have been true in the past, today’s volume and speed of data, and the innovative ways companies are using their data, mean that data is responsible — and motivation — for all business units.
To build an effective data governance program that serves every area of your business, it’s best to centralize the framework to reduce errors and reduce duplication efforts. “For federation groups to be successful in applying governance and data management rules, you can’t just set a policy and have every team build the technology to enforce it,” Syed said. speak. A less complex centralized approach to monitoring, facilitating data consistency and accuracy, and more transparency, all of which help with buy-in by parties relate to. “If you have a centrally managed data platform, a centrally managed data entry pipeline, and a centrally managed data policy, then you only make changes to your data. [the data] in one place,” Syed explained. This ensures data stays compliant, secure, and consistent wherever it’s used.
