Adoption of Data Governance by Business?

Adoption of Data Governance by Business?

A New Research Report from The Information Difference – Summer 2008

The mounting pressure on businesses to increase fiscal data compliance, accountability and transparency has compelled businesses to realize and accept that ERP systems and data warehouses alone are insufficient to really tackle the problem of inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data. In particular, there is a growing awareness that the processes that create and update corporate data need to be addressed if the data dragon is ever to be slain. This involves understanding, documenting and controlling the business rules that surround the creation of new business classifications (such as a new customer code, a new product line or brand, an updated hierarchy of engineering assets or organizational structure). This is commonly termed “data governance”.

Data governance is the process of establishing and maintaining cooperation between lines of business and management to establish standards for how common business data and metrics will be defined, propagated, owned and enforced throughout the organization. It is closely related to master data management (MDM), which is the management of data that is shared between computer systems, such as customer, product, asset, location or contract.

Although a growing number of organizations have put a tentative toe into the waters of master data management and data governance, there is scant concrete information relating to business motivation, level of maturity and adoption of data governance by business.

Against this background The Information Difference conducted a survey in August-September 2008 into the take-up, adoption and present level of maturity of data governance in business. 233 participants took part in the survey, 60% from companies with over USD $1 billion in revenue. 20% of respondents hold the job title of “Chief Architect” and 16% are CxOs or VPs. 64% were from North America, 20% from Europe and the rest elsewhere. 38% were drawn from the business and the remainder from IT.

The report has 46 pages.