Why is Data Governance Critical for Your Enterprise?

Unternehmen, die mit ihren Daten umgehen, erkennen, wie wichtig es ist, Data Governance zu implementieren, um ihre Datenbestände effektiv und effizient verwalten.

To fully understand what Data Governance is, many definitions exist:

“Data governance is a quality control discipline for adding new rigor and discipline to the process of managing, using, improving, and protecting organizational information.”
IBM Data Governance Council

„Data Governance ist die Ausübung von Autorität und Kontrolle (Planung, Überwachung und Durchsetzung) über die Verwaltung von Datenbeständen.“ Dama DMBok

“Data Governance is a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”
The Data Governance Institute

“Data governance is the formal orchestration of people, processes, and technology to enable an organization to leverage its data as an enterprise asset.”
MDM Institute

What is certain is that these definitions are far from being fun, but before we get into defining what data governance is, let’s see the reasons why it has become a strategic subject for enterprises.

What Drives Enterprises to Implement Data Governance?

In our experience, we’ve learned that enterprises tend to have one or several of these issues within their organizations:

Stammeswissen: In der Regel gibt es in Unternehmen eine Person oder eine ausgewählte Gruppe von Personen, die ihre Datenbestände produzieren, mit ihnen arbeiten und sie verstehen. Der Rest des Unternehmens hat jedoch keine Kenntnisse über deren Daten (woher sie kommen, welchen Wert sie haben, welche Qualität sie haben usw.). Dies führt dazu, dass die Unternehmen im Silo Informationen haben, die schwer zu nutzen und zu teilen sind.

Big mess: In the last decade, many complicated information systems have appeared resulting in enterprises having massive amounts of unorganized data. Data users are therefore subjected to data where their quality, uses or even location is unknown.

Compliance: All enterprises are subjected to some form of compliance may it be data privacy, general data usage or ethics. Those that do not have governance in their organizations will suffer from these rules and regulations.

Implementing Data Governance therefore helps enterprises resolve these problems.

With Data governance, enterprises are able to create a data fluent organization, organize their data and comply to the increasing regulatory demands.

Why Data Governance Fails in Enterprises

However, enterprises often look past implementing Data Governance. These organizations believe that:

• Governance implies control and not value.
• It slows down business.
• It is more of an IT concern than a business concern.
• Governance projects implemented in the past have failed too many times before.
• It is too big, there are no resources available.
• It’s nice to have, but not a priority.

What is a Good Strategy for Data Governance?

With all of that said, it is essential for enterprises to build the right sized Data Governance. There is not a unique way of implementing data governance: enterprises must know what kind of governance they need, the right style, and where they stand in the governance landscape.

We’ve identified two types of strategies when to comes to implementing Data Governance:

Defensive Data Governance

This dimension of Data Governance is more focused on risk control and risk management. Here, enterprises are making sure they respect data compliance (such as GDPR), privacy, and security. This framework goes hand in hand with some of the definitions seen above where it is more about “control”.

Offensive Data Governance

This dimension is more focused on producing value with data. With an offensive approach to Data Governance, enterprises are prioritizing value production and innovation.

Learn more about defensive & offensive data governance.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale, streamlining complex data environments and accelerating the delivery of AI-ready data. The Actian data intelligence approach combines data discovery, metadata management, and federated governance to enable smarter data usage and enhance compliance. With intuitive self-service capabilities, business and technical users can find, understand, and trust data assets across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Actian delivers flexible data management solutions to 42 million users at Fortune 100 companies and other enterprises worldwide, while maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction score.