by Angela Guess
A recent article covers a few data governances practices that should be avoided at all costs. The article begins, “More and more companies are recognizing that they’re accumulating ever-increasing amounts of data but not necessarily gaining business insights from it… That isn’t a problem technology can solve for you: The key step is establishing a data governance program to help your organization truly treat its data as a corporate asset by enforcing consistent definitions, rules, policies and procedures. That’s the goal, at least. Although enterprise data governance efforts have been launched at many companies, the success rate of these initiatives hasn’t been encouraging. There’s a lot of advice available on data governance best practices that should be adopted. The following discusses the top ‘worst practices’ and pitfalls that enterprises need to avoid.”
The first “worst” practice is buying-in but not committing: “IT often regards data governance sponsorship as business executives writing a check and putting people on a governance committee (see below). While that is in fact a great first step, the business needs to do more. People from the business side need to create the data definitions, business rules and key performance indicators (KPIs) for a data governance program; achieve agreement on them across an organization; enforce usage and compliance; and ensure that the definitions, rules and KPIs are updated on an ongoing basis as business needs evolve and change. The reality is that in the vast majority of cases, data governance tasks are merely tacked on to the already overloaded schedules of business managers instead of being made a priority, with other responsibilities correspondingly getting taken off their to-do lists. Without a real business-resource commitment, data governance will take a back seat to the daily firefight and will never be implemented effectively.”
