It seems ironic that today, in an era of unprecedented lapses of corporate behaviour, that there should be such an intense focus on governance.
From the US financial institutions to Arthur Brown's Fidentia; from Bernard Madoff's all-time record pyramid scheme to the bailout needed by the US Auto Big 3, governance is visibly at an all-time low (and let's not even mention public sector governance).
Yet governance is vital for the healthy and correct functioning of any organisation. Wikipedia defines it as relating "to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance". Further, "governance relates to consistent management, cohesive policies, processes and decision rights for a given area of responsibility".
Governance has evolved into a set of checks and balances that span many walks of corporate life. At an IT level, they have been standardised through COBIT, The Control Objectives for Information and related Technology.
COBIT, according to Wikipedia: "Provides managers, auditors, and IT users with a set of generally accepted measures, indicators, processes and best practices to assist them in maximising the benefits derived through the use of IT and developing appropriate IT governance and control in a company."
Just how important data is to business can be determined from the fact that it forms one of the five layers of the enterprise architecture stack, which is used to determine the technology shape and nature of any organisation.
Mervyn Mooi is director of Knowledge Integration Dynamics.
Once we accept that IT governance is a discipline separate from but subordinate to corporate governance, then it becomes clear that all the subsidiary IT issues and activities, among them data, become subject to the overall IT governance discipline and routine.
The topic of IT governance is too broad for data to be accorded its required level of attention, so data governance has arisen as a separate discipline.
It has done so due to five convergent forces:
* The sheer volumes of data being generated today: for most companies the volumes grow between 30% and 50% a year, every year.
* Increasing regulatory compliance and oversight, critical in a world where corporate violations continue to be the order of the day. Auditors and regulators need to be assured that data is auditable and traceable.
* The need for better security. We need just look at how cyber-thieves managed to steal R400 million from the government to understand the need to safeguard critical information.
* The understanding - belated though it is - by executives that data can be a source of competitive advantage.
* The ability to enhance business operation through quality data.
Just how important data is to business can be determined from the fact that it forms one of the five layers of the enterprise architecture stack, which is used to determine the technology shape and nature of any organisation: it forms the third layer of BIDAT, or business, information, data, applications and technology.
Semantics
Today, more than ever, data is moving into a position of prominence. As an example, The Open Group is focusing on semantic interoperability as a key initiative to help break down the challenges all companies face in communicating internally, across departments, divisions and between group companies; and externally, between suppliers and customers and business partners, and between financial institutions. The function of data engineering comes to the fore, where all data items will have context, relationships and rules with the objective of streamlining operations.
Semantic interoperability is the term that refers to the ability of two or more computer systems to communicate with each other accurately without human intervention.
Another example of how data is gaining corporate attention is the growth of the information quality market, which reached more than $1 billion in value last year, and continues to grow at 14% a year, twice as fast as the rest of the IT market (according to both Forrester and Gartner).
Corporate governance and IT governance have both become non-negotiable business imperatives; a little lower down the pecking order, but now gaining similar traction, is data governance.
Just as corporate governance and IT governance are applied through best practice, so should data governance be. Only in recent years have best practices evolved in the data governance arena.
Some of them are common sense and implicit and have been part of day-to-day data quality life for years; others are new and need to be rendered explicit.
In the second part in this two-part Industry Insight, I'll look at some of the best practices that companies should apply and inculcate to achieve optimal data governance.
* Mervyn Mooi is director of Knowledge Integration Dynamics.
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