Now these things aren't strictly about data governance. They are more about information quality and the management of information in general. Governance per se is the framework, policies and organization for making hard decisions when disagreements arise. But it generally devolves into the practical kinds of activities. It all goes to this discussion of is IT supporting the business or is the business providing appropriate resources to IT.
All : Has there been a tendency to separate data management and data governance?
Rowlands : That's a really interesting question. I don't think there has been a tendency to keep them separate. But data management has been around for a good, long time while data governance is really an emerging practice. Sometimes (governance) comes out of the data management world, and sometimes it's been imposed top-down by the business.
All : So should data governance be under the purview of business or IT? Rowlands: My gut feeling is that there are a couple major considerations that need to be taken into account. Is information a key part of the organization's value chain, or is it a supporting resource? If it's a key part of the value chain, I think governance migrates toward the business more than toward the IT function. And the other issue is how tightly regulated is the enterprise? Again, I suspect the more tightly regulated an enterprise is, the more likely it is to have a senior business player as the sponsor or the executive owner of the governance program.
All : It would seem that you'd want business and the IT to work closely together on data governance. Is that not happening today? Rowland : Of course that's right. And now you're kind of beating ASG's drum. Our core message is that it's been very difficult for business and IT functions to work together because they speak different languages. One of the things that ASG is striving to do with our Business Service Platform and our metadata initiative is to act as a translator, if you like.
All : So having business and IT work closely together is a best practice. Are there any others we should mention? Rowlands : I believe data governance initiatives without executive sponsorship are doomed to fail. After a while, the business will say, "Why are we spending money on that?" and they won't see the benefit.
All : I believe ASG recently integrated its software with a configuration management database. What are the advantages of this approach?
Rowlands : Organizations spend a lot of money on designing data and applications and business processes. They describe all of that, and hopefully they document it fairly well and they have a metadata repository at the heart of the documentation. And then you go toward practically implementing things, applications running on servers and databases on other servers, and so on and so forth. One of the critical governance questions is, "OK, is what I've deployed and am running in the real world the same as what I designed?"
The configuration management database discovers things that are actually deployed. If you use the same fundamental technology for your configuration management database and your enterprise metadata repository, then you have this really cool way of putting things side-by-side and saying, "Oh, that's not really what we designed." And because it's not, you know you have a challenge which needs to be exposed to the governance process. Do you need to go back and correct your design because you've updated something, or do you have something in production which needs to be remediated?
All : Obviously, the earlier you can identify problems like this, the better?
Rowlands : Yes, there's some research in the application development world that says if you think about the stages - design, develop, test, put into production - as you get into each stage there's a factor of ten increase in the cost of discovering something is out of whack. I think this is an equivalent thing - maybe even more costs - in the data world. One of the nasty things about data problems is that sometimes they don't actually reveal themselves for quite a long time. And that can be horribly expensive.
All : So what is the key takeaway about data governance? Rowlands : Let me put data governance in a bigger framework. The way I see the management of information technology and the business is that there are multiple parallel formalizations going on. There is a formalization of IT service management and business management processes. There is a formalization of data governance. There is an emerging formalization of enterprise architecture. All of those things really play together.
There is a kind of critical success factor, which is having a consolidated information platform that all of those things are based on. Organizations may do great work at standardizing all of their processes. But if they do it in silos, they end up with a disconnect between the various pieces and they find themselves having to go around and do rework. The underlying information base is going to be the critical key to IT and business success. And that's where data governance gets framed. It's part of making sure that the information base is consistent.
About the Author:
Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value.
