Leverage data as an enterprise asset

August 2008

Getting started with data

governance

Brett W. Gow
Associate Partner
IBM Global Business Services
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Executive summary
Contents
Data governance is both a strategic and tactical approach to managing
information. It involves political and technical organization to implement
2 Executive summary
policies in business processes and control the quality of information design,
2 Data governance
recognizes information as collection, use and reporting. For the last three years, the IBM® Data
an enterprise asset Governance Council and IBM Global Business Services have been
3 Exploring the data documenting data governance challenges and providing solutions. Today, your
governance lifecycle company can take advantage of this leadership and experience to shorten the
5 Moving up the data
learning process and get started with data governance.
governance maturity model
8 Technology and tools This white paper explains the IBM model for achieving data governance
11 IBM expertise helps
success, including new IBM software and services solutions to help make
support data governance
governing data easier, and offers concrete actions you can take today to help
success
increase revenue, cut costs and reduce the risks associated with managing
information.

Data governance recognizes information as an enterprise asset

Data governance is the orchestration of people, processes and technology to
enable an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset. It helps make
data more usable, accessible, consistent and trustworthy.

Driven by the need to have clear, concise, accurate data delivered to

decision makers, organizations are now understanding the need for and the
benefits of data governance.

According to a recent survey by The Data Warehousing Institute,1 there are

several reasons why data governance is becoming more important:

● The current “age of accountability” demands compliance.

● Compliance and business intelligence demand high-quality, auditable
data.
● Improving data quality is a cross-functional imperative.
● Data integration implementations cast an ever-widening net.
● Data governance helps reduce the risk incurred during business
transformations.
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Despite the growing level of interest, the current state of data governance is
hampered by organizations’ failure to strategically and appropriately leverage
their data. A survey from the International Association for Information and
Data Quality (IAIDQ) and University of Arkansas at Little Rock Information
Quality Program (UALR-IQ) reports that more than half of respondents
recognize information as a strategic asset and manage it accordingly—yet
“17% are neutral on this question and 25% feel their organizations do not
recognize information as a strategic asset.”2

Exploring the data governance lifecycle

Measuring data governance can be challenging. For that reason, the IBM Data
Governance Council, an industry thought leader, and IBM Global Business
Services suggest that companies use a Data Governance Maturity Model to
address organizational performance (see Figure 1); track progress across a
proposed data governance lifecycle and against a maturity model; and adopt
methods and metrics for reporting program progress and performance.

Figure 1: The five stages of data governance maturity

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Initially, companies can embrace data governance by following this path:

1. Recognize the need, value or imperative of data governance

2. Assess the organization’s current state using objective assessment,
specifically considering elements of policy, data quality and value
creation
3. Clarify the value or organizational imperative using the results of the
objective assessment
4. Identify leadership, responsibility and accountability for data
governance activities and accomplishments
5. Initiate data governance programs and projects
6. Define and deploy management processes and incorporate them into
“business-as-usual ” processes
7. Evolve data governance capabilities as the organization changes or
matures

An objective assessment or health check can provide an organization with

an informed, documented perspective on strengths and weaknesses. It often
confirms known truths and validates, invalidates or modifies commonly held
assumptions. It also brings new truths forward and can be used to establish a
foundation for strategies and tactics, including ownership and timelines.

IBM offers Data Governance Assessments that are designed to be

comprehensive, objective and quantifiable to help develop dialogue and build
consensus across the organization. Based on IBM’s considerable experience
and a library of more than 150 questions, these enterprise-wide assessments
are well defined and can be delivered quickly—often in six weeks or less—to
help effectively manage costs.
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Moving up the data governance maturity model

To move up the data governance maturity curve, organizations must consider
developing or acquiring several common elements or leading practices. Four
of the most important are data policies and guidelines; organizational change
management; data architectures; and data definitions or metadata.

Data policies and guidelines

Developing policies and guidelines for enterprise architectures is an important
step in defining and building conformance. A distributed structure can lead to
redundancy and a lack of consistent information, breaking down process
efficiency and effectiveness while increasing exposure to risk and regulatory
noncompliance.

Creating policies and initiatives to standardize architectures helps uncover

the redundant elements and structures that are often root causes of data
quality issues. Corollary metadata initiatives assist in this process by
identifying where similar data is housed and managed.

Organizational change management

Clear leadership roles and responsibilities are required as organizations plan,
align and mobilize data governance activities. Appropriate leadership and
management of the human element of change are critical to the success of a
transformation project, and organizations should not underestimate
organizational change management requirements and challenges. Plus, data
governance needs will change over time as the company grows and markets
evolve.
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To ensure appropriate planning and support for these changes, the

IBM Data Governance Council and IBM Global Business Services recommend
the following framework to understand how the current organization is
structured and behaves, and what enablers exist to motivate behaviors and
support the structure (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The IBM Organization Framework provides a view of the organization’s structure and supporting
activities.
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Data architectures
Shared or common enterprise data architectures aid in accelerating
technology initiatives while maintaining quality and data governance
standards. Consistently leveraging these architectures will also help prevent
duplication of effort across multiple projects. Once a model is validated, it
helps increase the consistency and performance of business solution
specification, design, delivery and use with minimized risk.

A common architecture model helps organizations achieve streamlined,

consistent business processes; reduce IT complexity; improve business
processes internally and across external business partners; achieve consistent
processes across products and channels; and achieve straight-through end-to­
end processing. Moreover, it facilitates consistent provision of products
through multiple channels and defines workflows and processes independent
of line of business, product, channel, organization structure and technology.

Companies can also use a common data model and reference architecture
to address compliance issues, promoting conformity of key performance and
risk indicators and reporting summary levels across the enterprise.
Appropriate designs can also support detailed financial reporting, down to the
transaction level of internal business processes across the organization.

Data definitions or metadata

Data governance tools and processes enable visibility into the impact of
business change on the IT infrastructure. To do this, they employ a
comprehensive and consistent dictionary to describe business issues,
applications and components, helping to define the organizational systems and
the impact of new initiatives.

Metadata plays a key role in business glossary efforts. It describes aspects of

data used within and across an organization, including its definition, source,
stewardship or ownership, location and its state and usage specifications.
Metadata management helps support a company’s business information
lifecycle by capturing the transformation of data as it turns it into information,
as information becomes knowledge and as it is finally translated into business
value.
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● Initial stage: Data—The organization’s raw source data has few quality
constraints, no quality checks and inconsistent structures and definitions
for the same or similar data across multiple repositories and databases.
● Second stage: Information—Data is consistently conformed through data
structures and common business definitions, which are provided and
maintained through shared processes. They often use tools and technology
as accelerators, as well as to increase the efficiency and consistency of
maintenance and management activities.
● Third stage: Knowledge—Information is available for sharing
consistently and coherently, both vertically and across the organization, in
support of analysis, fact-based decision making and consolidated
enterprise reporting and forecasting.
● Fourth stage: Business performance—The organization uses analysis
and fact-based decision making in the marketplace on behalf of individual
business and functional areas to the benefit of the entire organization.
Few, if any, decisions of magnitude are made without leveraging common
enterprise-level tools and decision methodologies.

Technology and tools

IBM offers a wide range of tools that can help accelerate the speed and
success of data governance initiatives, including initial adoption, process and
training conformation and value realization.

Policy tools
IBM Rational® RequisitePro collects and tracks all of the documents that are
relevant to a software development project, especially those representing
software requirements and use cases. It is both a document repository and a
database of project information, tracking the origination and change history of
requirements as they evolve.

RequisitePro enables project managers to classify and track software

requirements against a wide variety of project-specific criteria such as
completion status, degree of difficulty and size. Criteria can be tracked over
time using the tool’s metadata features.
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Enterprise architecture
The IBM Industry Models are a comprehensive set of industry-specific
business models that represent best practices for the given industry. The
models form an efficient communication bridge between business and
technology communities. They are designed to be readily accessible to
business users and focus on issues in areas such as customer insight,
multichannel transformation, core systems and risk and compliance.

The IBM Industry Models comprise:

● Information Models: Industry-specific data content to enable capabilities

such as enterprise-wide views of information
● Process Models: Industry-specific business process content to address
areas such as business process re-engineering
● Integration Models: Business services content to address areas such as
Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)

IBM InfoSphere™ Master Data Management (MDM) Server delivers a rich,

extensible enterprise repository and a robust set of business services for
master data. Master data is the high-value information (such as data about
customers, suppliers, partners, products, materials and employees) that is
critical for running a business, yet is typically scattered among heterogeneous
application silos across the enterprise. With IBM InfoSphere MDM Server,
master data can be brought into an application-independent repository,
yielding a complete, 360-degree view of the master data as well as a common
platform for maintaining the integrity and quality of master data across the
enterprise.

Data quality and metadata

The IBM InfoSphere Information Server platform helps organizations derive
more value from the complex, heterogeneous data within their information
ecosystems. It enables organizations to integrate disparate data and deliver
trusted information wherever and whenever needed, in line and in context, to
specific people, applications and processes.
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IBM InfoSphere Information Server also helps business and IT personnel

collaborate to understand the meaning, structure and content of any type of
information across any type of source and provides capabilities for cleansing,
transforming and delivering this information consistently and securely
throughout the enterprise.

Information lifecycle management

IBM Optim software is a powerful information lifecycle management (ILM)
solution that offers a central point to implement ILM policies across
heterogeneous structured data sources. It can extract, archive, port and
privacy-mask valuable application data from its creation through to its
eventual decommissioning—across all enterprise databases.

IBM Optim provides the following core functionalities to support data

governance efforts:

● Test data management: IBM Optim helps streamline creation and

management of test environments; subset and migrate data to build
realistic and right-sized test databases; and eliminate the expense and
effort of maintaining multiple database clones.
● Data privacy: Protecting your sensitive data does not stop at your
production system. This data is commonly replicated in multiple test
environments across your organization, as well as in extract files and
staging tables. IBM Optim provides automatic data transformation
capabilities to mask personal information and confidential information to
protect privacy.
● Archive: IBM Optim Data Growth provides proven database archiving
capabilities, empowering organizations to segregate historical from current
data and to store it securely and cost-effectively while maintaining
universal access.
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Value creation and performance measurement

IBM Cognos software features business intelligence and performance
management capabilities to help organizations:

● Integrate disparate data into a clear, consistent and accurate view of

performance at every level of your organization
● Deliver business-critical information to decision makers when, how and
where it is needed
● Identify and leverage “sweet spots” of information in core functional areas
for competitive advantage
● Plan, understand, manage and improve financial and operational
performance
● Answer the three questions that drive better performance: How are we
doing? Why? What should we be doing?

IBM expertise helps support data governance success

C-level executives face an onslaught of information-related processes, from
addressing regulatory compliance and reporting requirements to ensuring that
all business units are using the correct data to track customer preferences.
IBM continues to define, innovate and deliver the software, hardware and
services required to make even the most daunting data governance
undertaking successful.

Data governance is not new and neither are the challenges—but IBM tools,
techniques and support can help business decision makers at every level be
more effective, more consistent and more successful.
For more information © Copyright IBM Corporation 2008
IBM Software Group

For more information on IBM data governance products and services, please Route 100

contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit Somers, NY 10589

ibm.com/software/data/information/trust-governance.html Produced in the United States of America

August 2008

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1
“Data Governance Strategies: Helping your
Organization Comply, Transform, and Integrate.”
The Data Warehousing Institute. April 2008.
2
“The State of Data Governance.” International
Association for Information and Data Quality
(IAIDQ) and University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Information Quality Program (UALR-IQ). April
2008.

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