When it comes to business performance, data governance is now a must-have.
These days, organizations have to treat their data just like any other asset. They need to know what data they have, and maintain it and protect it, in order to drive operational efficiency and enable informed decision-making. This, in turn, allows businesses to maintain their competitive edge and innovate effectively while reducing time to market.
What if data governance ?
Data governance covers the full set of practices, policies, standards that enable an organization to manage, use and protect its data consistently and efficiently. It concerns the systems and processes through which organizations guarantee data quality, integrity, and security—as well as its availability and relevance for business requirements.
Data governance also encompasses the definition of stakeholder roles and responsibilities with a view to boosting reliability and achieving optimal access control.
In short, data governance frames how data is used within the organization, so that it can be managed consistently and efficiently.
Why is data governance important for my business
Data governance is a key plank of an organization’s data strategy. It can benefit your business in a number of ways:
- Supporting decision-making: Reliable, high-quality data is critical to informed decision-making, helping to guarantee the smooth running of any business.
- Reducing risks: Data governance helps to keep security and compliance risks to a minimum, while ensuring that an organization collects data in a safe and legal way.
- Optimizing data use: Optimized data use means data can more easily be shared and reused, while also protecting intellectual property and controlling access to data.
- Enhancing security: Deep knowledge of data locations and authorizations allows an organization to put in place processes and tools for monitoring and controlling access.
- Informing strategic planning: Good data governance can make a key contribution to strategic planning by providing a clear view of the organization’s data, its value, and its potential.
Our Data Governance offering
We’ll support you throughout the data governance life-cycle, from framing your approach and selling the concept to the executive committee, through to developing, deploying, and coordinating the related systems and processes.
We’ll also help you assess your organization’s level of maturity, identify the potential gains of effective data governance—as well as the costs of not doing data governance properly—and draw up a road map that aligns with your business strategy. We’ll work with you to prepare a pitch to sell the concept to your executive committee, and to identify sponsors.
We’ll assist you in fleshing out the detail of your data governance approach, ensuring it aligns with your priorities, your organizational structure, your business operations, and your systems and tools. Next, we’ll focus on operational implementation, covering aspects such as organization, roles and responsibilities, procedures, committee arrangements, and management systems. At this stage, we’ll also help you select and deploy the relevant tools: data exchange platform, repositories, catalog, data quality, and decision-making chain.
We offer end-to-end support to help you make data governance a success for your organization, spanning everything from designing and implementing key training and communication plans, through to supporting you with the necessary change management, working with you on the cultural, organizational, and human aspects of your transformation.
Methodology
Successfully implementing data governance involves a fine balance between people, systems, support, and communication. Our methodology focuses on addressing these four dimensions in parallel and in an integrated, holistic manner.
Our consultants are experts in precisely this kind of approach, bringing to bear their combined expertise in governance, technology fundamentals, and teaching and training.