But there is a silver lining here. As I shared with the survey results in my Oct 2009 research "Trends 2009: Master Data Management," while only 4 percent of my 113 survey respondents felt they had a very high level of data governance maturity (represented by a cross-enterprise, cross-functional data governance organization spanning both business and IT roles with top-down executive sponsorship and measurable value-add), the vast majority of these organizations also recognized "trusted data technologies" like data quality and MDM as critical path to their organization's success. Most organizations admit there remain a number of inhibitors (mostly political, prioritization and ROI calculation-related) that make it difficult to support large investments in these technologies. But most also believe that data governance is the right approach to bridging this driver/inhibitor gap and are investing more time and resources to figure out how to operational data governance processes within their own organizational context and culture.
In my interactions with Forrester client, I get the sense that data governance is receiving the most senior management-level attention today than I've seen throughout my 18+ year data management career. One of the biggest turning points has been the growing recognition that data governance is not – and should never have been – about the data. High quality and trustworthy data sitting in some repository somewhere does not in fact increase revenue, reduce risk, improve operational efficiencies or strategically differentiate any organization from its competitors. It’s only when this trusted data can be delivered and consumed within the most critical business processes and decisions that run your business that these business outcomes can become reality. So what is data governance all about? It’s all about business process, of course.
My Forrester colleague Clay Richardson (who covers Business Process Management technologies and best practices) and I have been collaborating on a concept we call Process Data Management which recognizes that effective data management requires a focus on business processes – and vice versa. We kicked off our discussion on this topic in our research “Warning: Don’t Assume Your Business Processes Use Master Data” and will be publishing another piece later this quarter called “Align Process And Data Governance To Deliver Effective Process Data Management” which will focus on the need for data and process governance efforts to be more aligned to deliver real business value from either. Later this year I’ll also be publishing an update to my annual MDM trends piece “Trends 2010: Master Data Management” which will include new survey results reviewing data governance and MDM maturity.
I'm optimistic that we might finally see some real momentum building for data governance to be embraced as a legitimate competency within many large organizations – especially with a focus on business processes to help evangelize and secure business sponsorship. It will likely be a number of years before best practices outnumber worst practices, but any momentum in data governance adoption is good momentum!
Rob also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/rob_karel/.
When we began thinking about designing a product for data governance, we made a conscious decision NOT to build it on top of our MDM product for all the points you mention above. What was critical in our mind was creating an intersection between data, process and organization to create our "Unified Business Model", the core of the Kalido Data Governance Director.
Another point I'd make is that not all data needs to be governed. Our view is that we support the business process of data management by governing data as a shared enterprise asset- and that as with all assets, data assets need to be "valued" in order to determine whether or not it needs to be governed.
Our Lighthouse customers have confirmed that there are significant cultural and behavioral issues associated with data governance, but that an enabling technology like ours that can operationalize data governance programs is a big step in the right direction.
Thanks for shining a pragmatic light on such an important topic!
Bill Hewitt
Everything the organization needs is built on good data. New processes will not help if the data is not fit for the new purpose. The organization will fail if they believe the information that comes from a new process that uses data that is not fit for the purpose of the new processes. Data Governance works when it can answer the fundamental question of what processes the data can be used with.