Feel free to leave thoughts and comments on this below!

Siperian calls it “Master Data Governance”, and we define it as “the orchestration of people, policies, procedures and technology to manage enterprise data availability, usability, integrity and security for business process efficiency and compliance.”

They go on to ask him how an organization can start data governance without being overwhelmed. I think he makes a nice point that data governance should not be applied to all data… it is too expensive and time consuming to do that.

My thought is that before you ever start data governance, you need to figure out why you need data governance. What data is most important? What data is being abused? If you put the answers to these two questions in a Venn Diagram, the place where it overlaps is likely a good start for the scope.


You can read the full (brief) article here.

It is really well written and focuses on data quality, data governance, and data management.

“Data is the foundation of practically everything that goes on in today’s organizations, and so managing the quality of data is reaching “business-critical” status.”

You’ve probably noticed by now that we switched up the site design earlier this week. We’ve gone with a cleaner look so that the focus is clearly on the content. We’ve also added some space in the sidebar to your right for advertisers. The vision for The Data Governance Blog is to grow into a valuable resource for data management professionals. That means our content will encompass learning about best practices, past experiences, industry events, vendors, and products.

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As part of our vision, we’re reaching out to you to help us grow. Would you like to be a guest contributor? Your writeups don’t have to be long or involved like traditional journals and magazines. We’re all about quick hitting information here. If you have a good tip or a past experience (good or bad) that you learned from, please contribute! Or, if you read an article recently and you have some comments on it, please share! All you have to do to contribute is shoot me an email.

Recent Data Management News

Developing a Successful Master Data Management RFP–Steps to Avoid
And includes a very helpful list of “Ten Costly RFP Mistakes to Avoid ”

Co-Operators, BMO, bank on Big Blue software
This covers IBM’s new product and some of the business needs for Customer Data Inegration (CDI).

Business Intelligence in Healthcare: The Drivers – Consultant Jill Dyche muses about Health Care issues, and new attempts to fix their old problems.

TIBCO’s New Master Data Management Software Offers Industry-First Feature Set – Tibco has released new Master Data Management Software

Is Informatica An Acquisition Target? – It won’t help you with your program, but if you’re interested in the industry or if you use Informatica, this is an interesting article about how Sramana Mitra thinks Informatica is an acquisition target

Q&A: The Ins and Outs of Enterprise Master Data Management – A good article on the future of MDM

Varonis Joins Data Governance Council Formed by IBM — Some info on Varonis and the IBM Data Governance Council

Governance Portal
This is a pretty good article in DMReview about the beginning stages of data governance. It states that, “data quality is the first step towards a proactive data governance initiative”. Its a very timely post, as I’m headed to the Information and Data Quality conference next week, and it gives a nice perspective to judge the various venders that will certainly be presenting their wares.

What’s exciting about LogLogic?
This short article from Philip Howard reviews LogLogic, a product that enables you to bring all of your log data into a single place for analysis. Phillip acknowledges that logs are a snoozefest, but what LogLogic does certainly seems valuable. He touches on data governance at the end, mentioning that the output of LogLogic analysis will help in the data governance program.

The Impact of Data Governance on M&A
Phillip really cranked out the articles for IT-Director this week… In this writeup he makes the case that if a company wants to be acquired, “then it would be a good idea to have good data governance in place.” Likewise, if you are looking to aqcuire companies, it would be very wise of you to look for companies that have good data governance in place. This is really an interesting read…

So, because I was really looking for something of high-value to provide to you, I’ve spent the last hour searching through all of the Data Governance articles I have bookmarked over the months and one really stuck out. Its an easy read and provides a clear description of where Data Governance belongs in an organization and why.

“The Data Stewardship Approach to Data Governance” writeup is located at TDAN. Give it a read today and really consider what it is saying. I’ve mentioned that my program is run out of IT, but the council is made up exclusively of business leaders, leveraging IT SMEs when needed. This works for us, and I personally believe that the business needs to always steer the data governance agenda.

You can go straight to the webinar registration area by clicking here or by pointing your browser to http://www.trilliumsoftware.com/home/events/web-events.aspx

Additionally, you may want to have a comment field for discussions that took place around this data field (not part of the metadata description, but in a separate area) and you’ll definitely want to have a place where you can indicate where the field currently is on your data maturity model.

One thing that we didn’t do, which I now regret, is to have a ‘date last reviewed’ area for a data element. This would certainly help as I’d quickly know when this particular field last came before the council. Since I don’t have this, I have to rely on a combination of memory and a review of my meeting minutes, notes, and website to find that date.