by Angela Guess
Sunil Soares of IBM recently shared his insights on how to get executive leadership to buy into a data governance program in this tight economy. Soares commented, “If you talk to IT practitioners they will say that they’ve been doing data governance forever. The key difference now is that the business is seeing the value of information governance and the business is taking ownership of the data. This discipline of information or data governance is about aligning business and IT to set information policy. That [process] has to be very specific to industry and it’s got to be specific to job functions. How you do information governance relative to risk in a bank is completely different than it is for a merchandiser or a retailer or a manufacturer.”
He continued, “One thing we’re starting to see is a need for convergence between ‘big data’ and information governance. I’m calling it big data governance. As an example – and I love this example – think about oil and gas companies. For them, seismic data is critical. They were buying seismic data from third parties. That is big data because there is a lot of it, it comes in fast and it’s unstructured. But [the two sides] were using inconsistent nomenclature and calling the same piece of seismic data something different. As a result, [oil and gas companies] actually went and spent money on the same data twice. If they had good stewardship around what we call metadata – data about data – then they would have a higher probability that they wouldn’t be calling the same thing something inconsistent.”
