There’s no denying that data is a valuable organisational asset. It represents the key to business development and organisational success. If an organisation isn’t analysing data to enhance business processes, uncover customer insights, and identify competitive opportunities, they have almost no chance of remaining competitive. Building a data governance business case is the key.
By Gary Allemann, MD of Master Data Management
While all businesses are eager to leverage data in a meaningful way, they first need a solid data governance foundation. As companies collect data from numerous sources, they must ensure it is accurate and reliable. They must also confirm business users understand where that data is located, where it originated, and how it applies to the business. Data governance is the strategy that organises people, processes, and technology to establish trustworthy, and easily understandable data.
Over the last decade, many organisations have struggled to operationalise data governance because of siloed approaches, competing priorities, and a lack of resources. But now, a major shift has evolved, and more organisations are increasing their investment in an enterprise-wide approach to data governance to ensure high-quality, well-managed information. It’s also critical to decision-making, innovating, and modernising.
Bringing the value of data governance to the enterprise is imperative. Without an enterprise-wide data governance approach, organisations will fail to capitalise on countless business opportunities and suffer short- and long-term consequences.
So why hasn’t every business established an overarching data governance program?
Obstacles and How to Solve Them
One of the biggest roadblocks to data governance is gaining buy-in. Not only gaining approval from the executive team but also garnering support from functional teams across the organisation.
Successful data governance requires participation from individuals across every department, from sales and marketing to IT and operations. Everyone must contribute to make governance successful and maximise the data’s value.
The best way to encourage program participation is by tying governance to revenue-driven initiatives. Governance requires business-driven and quality-focused strategies to achieve business objectives and deliver ROI.
That’s why generating enterprise support and excitement to secure a budget for governance, requires a well-crafted business case.
Developing a Business Case to Foster Data Governance Support
A compelling business case outlines why data governance is a top priority and addresses the organisation’s challenges and solutions. For example, perhaps the organisation is facing a slew of regulatory hurdles. If so, the business case should outline how governance will streamline regulatory reporting for the compliance team and eliminate costly regulatory penalties.
Maybe the company is struggling to centralise data from disparate systems. The business case would cover how governance helps ensure confidence in investments placed in consolidating systems or migrating to a cloud environment. Or, it could be that the IT team spends more time fixing data quality issues than running analytics. The business case would focus on how governance proactively solves data quality issues for the most impactful data, saving IT time and money.
Identify Business Goals and Objectives
The business case must also include input from diverging business lines about their data difficulties. Identifying the metrics around the goals and objectives of all data users and how data governance will benefit them is critical to gaining buy-in from your data team.
Once the benefits of data governance are understood and input is generated across the organisation, the next step is to outline how to best execute the business case.
Building a Plan
Data governance is most successful when it is an enterprise-wide strategy that is well-understood and well-established for processes that everyone can follow. To do this, organisations need a data governance team to create a program that accounts for everyone’s needs.
A successful data governance team starts with support from the leadership team. Typically, a chief data officer (CDO) leads governance efforts and works with a centralised or federated team, made up of leaders from various departments like marketing, HR, operations and IT. Identifying data owners, stewards, and users becomes a critical part of ongoing data governance management.
Together, the governance team creates and manages processes for resolving data quality issues, tracking compliance, documenting data lineage, ingesting metadata, building data catalogues, analytical reports, and more. All procedures must be repeatable and easy to execute for both the IT and business teams.
Furthermore, the business case should list all expected outcomes. For example:
- Easily understandable data terms across the entire company.
- Improved data trust among business users.
- Enhanced end-to-end data quality.
- Clearly defined data lineage from both a business and technical standpoint.
- Increased data usage among business users, generating additional ROI.
- Verified data behind all business decisions.
- Fast and easy proof of regulatory compliance.
In the end, outlining expected outcomes in the data governance business case demonstrates its value across the enterprise and boosts executive buy-in for the necessary funding and resources.
Once the data governance team selects the appropriate technologies to accompany their data governance strategy, it’s time to work on making data consistent, improving data quality, and impacting the bottom line.