Data Governance Strategies Strengthen Business Information

In today’s enterprise, data is the key. It enables a business to make its best decisions and efficiently manage its business processes.

Data is demanded by many departments and must be gathered, sorted, cleaned, managed, analyzed and protected. Because data is often gathered from applications, it likely falls in the realm of IT, where business intelligence and analytics systems are managed. However, what many IT organizations lack is a framework for data governance—a solid set of processes and policies that dictate the way data is supervised and preserved.

The book “Data Governance: Creating Value from Information Assets,” provides a detailed look into information governance; it begins with a chapter on how data governance plays a role in an enterprise, moves through management of metadata, and then explains how to operationalize data quality. Other chapters include:

• Semantic Analytics and Ontologies
• Data Privacy, Security and Compliance through Data Governance
• Adaptive Data Governance: The AT-EASE Change Management Approach
• Case Study: State Level Governance of Health Information Exchange

From our IT Downloads, you can read Chapter 1, “The Role of Data Governance in an Organization,” and find out how data governance fits in within your company. What will it mean to your organization to have a set of policies and procedures for data? According to this chapter:

Information and data governance supports an organization’s strategic approach involving planning, choosing and sometimes improvising or shifting approaches dynamically based on the competitive environment. Data governance supports the systematic management and use of information to achieve objectives that are clearly aligned with and contribute to the organization’s objectives.

Through this chapter, you will learn about the relationships among the business units in your organization and how they may use and share data. It also provides details on what information should be included within a data governance strategy, such as policies on ethics and making data reporting transparent. The chapter gives an important timeline for enterprise growth in regard to data governance:

In the early stages of an organization’s growth, the management hierarchy usually remains flat rather than layered. Management executives of such organizations are still trying to find an internal organizational structure that works well and, therefore, will not have the time or the opportunity to set up a well-defined data governance system.

This chapter provides an essential look at how data governance fits into the structure of a company at any point along the timeline. It will help your enterprise begin building a robust strategy for governing its data that will help the entire organization utilize information more efficiently and effectively than ever before.