by Angela Guess
Will Crump recently wrote in Business2Community, “The bigger the business, the more data it has. UPS, for example, stores more than 16 petabytes of data as it tracks packages and customer requests. But any company of any size can improve its data. That’s where data governance — the process of managing information and creating policies that ensure its accuracy — comes in. Enforcing data rules leads to better productivity, accurate assessments, and cost-effectiveness. Implementing proper policies ensures that an enterprise has clean data that everyone can understand, which wards off errors and confusion. Then, companies can reach what Forrester calls ‘Data Governance 2.0,’ which opens the potential for predictive analytics and behavioral marketing.”
Crump goes on, “In today’s enterprises, loftier Data Governance 2.0 and digital transformation efforts are top of mind for executives. However, these initiatives can’t even begin until data governance is solidly in place. The triggers that drive the need for data governance vary, and they include: (1) Lack of Context: A business may do a great job capturing and documenting rules, standards, and business processes, but if that’s done from only a technical perspective, it decreases the work’s meaning… (2) Tribal Knowledge: Sometimes, one person or a group keeps all the standards and rules for the company in his own personal database. Sometimes this is a complicated Excel spreadsheet only he can understand, and other times it’s kept completely within his own brain… (3) Entry Confusion: Details as small as formatting can lead to costly mistakes. For example, one company didn’t have a protocol and documentation in place for entering suppliers’ names, one of which was IBM. Different data stewards entered ‘International Business Machines,’ ‘IBM,’ and ‘I.B.M.’ as separate suppliers, even though they denoted the same business.”
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