Entries Tagged 'Data Governance' ↓

One of the key components of data governance is assisting in determining who the data stewards (some say data owners) are for the critical and/or enterprise data. I tend to like the term steward because ‘owner’ implies full-control over the data, but nonetheless, the terms are generally used synonymously.

It is extremely important that the data governance office provides guidance to the business on who the ‘go to person’ is for the different data domains. IT doesn’t own the data, the business does (despite what anyone may tell you!). A great analogy on how “IT People are like Forklift Drivers” is provided here by Michael R. Farnum. He wrote it so clearly that I won’t even bother to elaborate, but rather urge you to check out his blog post.

I found this great data governance white paper via a press release. It surveyed many different companies working on data governance and compiled the findings into fascinating results. Take a look at the PDF here.

I have the book ‘Business Rule Concepts‘ by Ronald G. Ross to give away. It retails for $39.99 at Amazon. The sub-title is “Getting to the Point of Knowledge” and it focuses on practical solutions for urgent business challenges through business rule management.

If you are interested, all I’m looking for is a short post or article to share with the readers here. Send me a short email here about an experience you’ve had, something you’ve learned, something you’ve done wrong, etc in the data management field and you’ll have a really good chance at getting this $40 book for free.

I came across an interesting Q&A article with Ravi Shankar, Director of Product Marketing at Siperian. The questions were about Master Data Management and Data Governance (or what they call Master Data Governance). His answer to the question, ‘What is Data Governance?’ is quite nice…

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.”

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The Data Governance Institute has published a Data Governance Framework/Whitepaper here. There is some good information in it, whether you are just staring or have been at it for a long time.

In my post ‘8 Reasons why Data Governance fails‘, Carol S asked, “Does anyone have experience in developing a data governance strategy?”. I haven’t talked with her about this yet, but I’d like to recommend the following high-level path to launching Data Governance in an organization. This is very high level (read: quick & dirty), so you’ll need to take time and break these steps down into discrete tasks.

1. Start a Data Initiative to fix a few specific problems
Before the words ‘data governance’ are ever uttered, start an initiative to fix a few problems that span the enterprise. Make sure these are problems that bother people so that you’ll get buy-in. As part of this initiative, build a business team that will work on the problems (they’ll later become your Data Stewardship Council).
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Metrics are very useful for many reasons. They can help you track your progress and give you a clear, non-subjective view of how you are doing. You can build goals around them and they are incredibly useful in presentations to others not so familiar with your program. I recently found myself having to give a spur-of-the-moment presentation to our executive sponsors, and I thought I’d give you a little insight on how I quickly put together a strong presentation with information I already had. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time developing material or crunching data, it was already available to me.
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This post was written by Vincent McBurney, blogger at ITToolbox and consultant for BearingPoint.

A Carnival is a monthly publication of links to interesting articles on a topic - in this case data quality. It travels to different blog homes each month. We have some great DQ blogs for the first issue and at the bottom of the post we announce the host of issue #2.

Here are the DQ posts for issue #1. Please visit the blogs highlighted and leave comments to show your support.

An Amazon Post that’s not about the Kindle

Daragh O’Brien is busy in Data Quality. Why are there so many DQ gurus in Ireland? He is part of the The International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and writes the entertaining IQ Trainwrecks blog. He has submitted a great article from there called oops Amazon did it again… about how a search for a Spiderman wristwatch on Amazon returns something unexpected. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Continue reading →

Dataflux is sponsoring a free Webcast today titled “ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance”. Jill Dyché and Evan Levy will discuss:

• Why MDM needs to be deconstructed into discrete functional areas

• Why understanding business requirements means understanding functional requirements

• Why successful MDM depends on a solid data governance framework

The webcast is Today at 2PM EST. To register, click here.

This is an un-sponsored post.

When starting a new initiative as large as Data Governance, it often helps to show its benefits. The problem with this is that when you are first starting, the benefits you are touting are merely theoretical to those you are trying to sell because nothing has actually happened yet. When my data governance program was started we never mentioned the buzz word ‘data governance’… we actually didn’t really use buzz words or try to categorize it. For us, the key was to just start a project that was fixing a major business problem. The process we developed for solving these problems became the Data Governance program.
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