Data Governance Program, Project, and Conference I

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2

Does Grammar Matter with Data Governance?
2011-10-01 03:52:00
When individuals think about data governance one of the last things they often think about is grammar. In fact, most data stewards focus on the alpha numeric structure of their data or how the organization they work for categorizes different types of data. However, grammar is an important part of your data structure and their are a number of things you can do to implement policies and approaches in your data governance strategy to ensure that your data accounts for quality grammar. An area that grammar is most important when applying it to data governance is when you’re considering data elements that accept open ended information from individuals entering data into your system. This scenario may allow for data entry employees to use short hand, improper grammar, or text that only they can read. This makes it difficult to gain any value from the data you’ve collected and entered into your enterprise systems. Data Governance Tools – Grammar Checkers One of th...
More About: Matter

Data Governance Tools
2011-01-02 07:20:00
As with any kind of industry, it is extremely critical for every business owner to be able to manage data efficiently and effectively. Data governance tools play a critical role in the organization because of its ability to help cut back on labor and eradicating manual processes through the use of integrated computer and software applications. Contrary to popular belief, data governance has been around for the past few decades. It is only but recently that more people have begun to appreciate what it can bring to their business. Because of the threat of recession and budget losses, company owners have really taken the effort to find ways on how to improve on business results. Data governance used to be an option, but it was not necessarily always the first choice to consider. This was because it was very expensive to avail of data governance services in the past. Today, this type of application is now very easy to use and will be applicable in any part of the region. If you are stil...
More About: Tools , Governance

Finding a Good Data Governance Job
2010-12-19 19:47:00
I often help friends of mine who are looking for jobs in Data Governance by connecting them with colleagues, clients, former co-workers, and other industry professionals.  One think I hear quite often is how hard it is to find good jobs online.  I decided to do a bit of searching to see what the online job search landscape was like, and I paid particular attention to jobs in the data management industry. The first thing I noticed was the large number of scams there are on these job boards.  I see a large number of work-from-home scams, ‘get your bachelors degree in 3 months’ type scams, and all around fake looking job posts.  It seemed that no matter where I looked, I found stuff like this – CareerBuilder, Monster, HotJobs, Indeed, etc.  The one place I had good luck with finding real jobs while cutting through the garbage is Jobfox. The Jobfox Scam policy ensures that spam and other bad stuff stays out of their listings.  You can read a bit more about the th...
More About: Good

Data Governance Talent
2010-12-10 01:00:00
Can you imagine what the world would be like without information technology, data and research? Centuries ago, people had to just rely on each other without knowing how to manage the information that they have been exposed to. If we fast forward it to today’s generation, almost every single business in the organization have been dependent on data for their companies to thrive. Whether it’s something as a simple database for recordkeeping to something as advanced as a computerized system to help them generate millions in revenue, we all understand that managing accurate and complete data is of the essence. Keeping this consistent is the focal point of data governance. While data and information is now easily available to us, data governance is something that still needs to be managed by someone who really understands the business. Implementing the best talent acquisition strategies goes beyond just the simple knowledge of certain computer programs or a Black Belt in Six Sigma. Th...
More About: Data , Governance

Why You Should Secure Your Company’s Data Records
2010-12-03 11:19:00
You do not have to be an FBI agent to keep your records secure. As a business owner, you want to ensure that everything that comes and goes into your systems are well protected, kept and stored. Data governance these days mean more than just a room full of file cabinets and thick folders. As we continue to move to a more paperless environment, we rely less on paper and hard copies of documents to a more streamlined, computerized and technology based system. While data governance has shifted from hard copy to software, you should realize that the automated processes will not be sustained on its own. This kind of data management still needs a point of contact to be held accountable to the accuracy and security of the records you keep.  Aside from that, you also want to be sure that all pertinent information can easily be shared with all employees when needed. This may not be a huge problem to small and medium sized businesses, but as your company starts to grow and you start to emplo...

Data Stewards & Data Governance
2010-05-11 18:58:00
A Data Governance team banks on its credibility to effectively handle data and ensure that the quality of data is flawless.  These responsibilities aren’t easy to perform, hence the need to make use of Data Stewards.   Data come from many sources – in the form of internal and external customers as well as 3rd party vendors and providers.  The amount of data gathered from all of these sources can very quickly become overwhelming.  This is where the role of the Data Stewards come into play.  Data Stewards are usually people that assume collateral duties of managing data in addition to their other roles (which could be doing any other types of tasks anywhere in the enterprise). In some cases, the Data Stewardship group within an organization is composed of the Data Stakeholders themselves.  These Data Stewards ensure that data-related decisions are carried out in a way that doesn’t conflict with another person or entity within the organization.   Aside from technical ski...

Data Governance Decision Rights
2010-05-11 18:54:00
Decision Rights are a key concern when it comes to Data Governance .  They can be very hard to define since there are some considerations regarding data, specifically in relation to rules and standards, that must be addressed. One issue that must be reviewed is deciding on just exactly who has the power to decide. Likewise, questions regarding when and how decisions can be made and conceptualized should also be settled.  Therefore, to avoid any inconsistencies, the Data Governance program must clearly define and document all decision rights. This documentation should also include those detailed and further information on all decisions made in regards to data. These decision rights must be defined very well to avoid any conflict, specifically when it comes to settling issues. On the other hand, decision-rights for programs related to compliance are quite easy to identify. The executive level of an organization has the power to choose if they will follow a certain standard, law or re...
More About: Decision

The Mission and Vision of Data Governance
2010-05-11 18:41:00
To identify all governing rules and regulations, to continuously protect the interests of data stakeholders and to meditate and settle any issues as a result of disobedience to the said rules and regulations are the three main mission of Data Governance . These missions of Date Governance reflect those greatly affected by the process, specifically those data stakeholders and other participants.  To simply yet fully comprehend the mission and vision of Data Governance, let us take the example of on of the most common organization- a bicameral government. Data governance operates like this kind of government with its three separate branches: the executive branch, legislative branch and the judicial branch- all having their own duties, functions, and checks & balances. For background, the legislative passes, makes and even changes laws, the judicial branch interprets these laws specifically in terms of settling and resolving issues and the executive branch makes sure that these law...

Improving Data Quality by Going to the Source (with an assist from Data Gov
2010-05-11 18:37:00
Data Governance is the lifeblood of an enterprise.  Why?  It is mainly because a business cannot stand on its own without its patrons.  These customers vary in demographics; hence, their personal information varies from one another.  The quality of customer information tends to dwindle due to the number of sources where the information comes from. The more we get the information “close to the source”, the better the quality of information that we gather all-together.   In order to achieve utmost data quality, it has to start from the bottom-up. An enterprise needs to solidify and integrate this information into one silo and create processes and profiles to collect the data upstream.  Effective Data Governance requires that customer information be available where need be at the most opportune time when it is needed. Data should be centralized in a way that it would be easy for the Data Stewards to look for information and make necessary changes where applicable. We need to...
More About: Data , Source , The Source

Data Stakeholders
2010-05-11 18:32:00
Who are considered Data Stakeholders? Data Stakeholders can be individuals, groups, or departments within an organization that have direct or indirect use of the data structures.  Data Stakeholders are often comprised of people from departments such as IT, Quality Assurance, Marketing, Operations, etc.  These are generally the same set of people who gather the data, compile the data, track updates about the data and ensure that the data are compliant to the focus of the business. An effective Data Governance team must know which Data Stakeholders to get in contact with depending on what type of data they need or are working on.  For example, if a company needs to know the current market trends and behavior, the Data Governance team should be able to identify at first brush that they need to get a hold of a representative from the Marketing department. If data about providing quality customer service is needed, then they need to get in contact with someone from the Quality Assuran...

“IT People are like Forklift Drivers”
2008-03-12 14:25:00
One of the key components of data governance is assisting in determining who the data stewards (some say data owners) are for the critical and/or enterprise data. I tend to like the term steward because ‘owner’ implies full-control over the data, but nonetheless, the terms are generally used synonymously. It is extremely important that the data governance office provides guidance to the business on who the ‘go to person’ is for the different data domains. IT doesn’t own the data, the business does (despite what anyone may tell you!). A great analogy on how “IT People are like Forklift Drivers” is provided here by Michael R. Farnum. He wrote it so clearly that I won’t even bother to elaborate, but rather urge you to check out his blog post.

Trillium Master Data Management (MDM) Webinar
2008-03-11 18:05:00
I just received word on this webinar on 3/25 and thought I’d share the link: Trillium MDM Webinar . Just click on ‘enroll’ to the right of the first event. Feel free to leave comments about it in the comments section, and if you know of any others please post in the comments section as well.
More About: Management , Data , Master , Data Management

An Information Management Fairy Tale
2008-03-03 14:30:00
I found this video on YouTube and thought it was great. It is embedded below, but if that doesn’t work for you here is the URL: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TbzQvswrOTw Feel free to leave thoughts and comments on this below!
More About: Information , Management , Fairy Tale , Tale

Corporate Data Governance Best Practices
2007-12-13 14:45:00
I found this great data governance white paper via a press release. It surveyed many different companies working on data governance and compiled the findings into fascinating results. Take a look at the PDF here.
More About: Corporate , Data , Governance

Business Rule Concepts
2007-12-11 13:15:00
I have the book ‘Business Rule Concepts ‘ by Ronald G. Ross to give away. It retails for $39.99 at Amazon. The sub-title is “Getting to the Point of Knowledge” and it focuses on practical solutions for urgent business challenges through business rule management. If you are interested, all I’m looking for is a short post or article to share with the readers here. Send me a short email here about an experience you’ve had, something you’ve learned, something you’ve done wrong, etc in the data management field and you’ll have a really good chance at getting this $40 book for free.
More About: Sine

Where do I start?
2007-12-10 13:30:00
I came across an interesting Q&A article with Ravi Shankar, Director of Product Marketing at Siperian. The questions were about Master Data Management and Data Governance (or what they call Master Data Governance). His answer to the question, ‘What is Data Governance?’ is quite nice… Siperian calls it “Master Data Governance”, and we define it as “the orchestration of people, policies, procedures and technology to manage enterprise data availability, usability, integrity and security for business process efficiency and compliance.” (more…)
More About: Start

Data Governance Framework / Whitepaper
2007-12-07 12:30:00
The Data Governance Institute has published a Data Governance Framework /Whitepaper here. There is some good information in it, whether you are just staring or have been at it for a long time.

Does anyone have experience developing a data governance strategy?
2007-12-06 13:45:00
In my post ‘8 Reasons why Data Governance fails‘, Carol S asked, “Does anyone have experience in developing a data governance strategy?”. I haven’t talked with her about this yet, but I’d like to recommend the following high-level path to launching Data Governance in an organization. This is very high level (read: quick & dirty), so you’ll need to take time and break these steps down into discrete tasks. 1. Start a Data Initiative to fix a few specific problems Before the words ‘data governance’ are ever uttered, start an initiative to fix a few problems that span the enterprise. Make sure these are problems that bother people so that you’ll get buy-in. As part of this initiative, build a business team that will work on the problems (they’ll later become your Data Stewardship Council). (more…)
More About: Strategy , Experience

Data Governance Metrics Dashboard
2007-12-05 13:07:00
Metrics are very useful for many reasons. They can help you track your progress and give you a clear, non-subjective view of how you are doing. You can build goals around them and they are incredibly useful in presentations to others not so familiar with your program. I recently found myself having to give a spur-of-the-moment presentation to our executive sponsors, and I thought I’d give you a little insight on how I quickly put together a strong presentation with information I already had. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time developing material or crunching data, it was already available to me. (more…)
More About: Dashboard , Data , Metrics , Governance

Carnival of Data Quality #1 - Make Data Quality Interesting
2007-12-04 13:03:00
This post was written by Vincent McBurney, blogger at ITToolbox and consultant for BearingPoint. A Carnival is a monthly publication of links to interesting articles on a topic - in this case data quality. It travels to different blog homes each month. We have some great DQ blogs for the first issue and at the bottom of the post we announce the host of issue #2. Here are the DQ posts for issue #1. Please visit the blogs highlighted and leave comments to show your support. An Amazon Post that’s not about the Kindle Daragh O’Brien is busy in Data Quality . Why are there so many DQ gurus in Ireland? He is part of the The International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and writes the entertaining IQ Trainwrecks blog. He has submitted a great article from there called oops Amazon did it again… about how a search for a Spiderman wristwatch on Amazon returns something unexpected. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. (more…)
More About: Interesting , Make

ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance
2007-11-20 12:00:00
Dataflux is sponsoring a free Webcast today titled “ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance ”. Jill Dyché and Evan Levy will discuss: Why MDM needs to be deconstructed into discrete functional areas Why understanding business requirements means understanding functional requirements Why successful MDM depends on a solid data governance framework The webcast is Today at 2PM EST. To register, click here. This is an un-sponsored post.
More About: Data

Business Process Management Survey
2007-11-19 12:55:00
If you’re involved in Business Process Management (BPM), you may be interested in the Zoomerang survey available here. All participants receive a complimentary $5 gift card from Starbucks and five participants will win an iPod touch. This post isn’t sponsored - but I know many of us are involved in BPM so it is a decent opportunity. If you’re not sure what BPM is, here’s a little bit from wikipedia: Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.
More About: Survey , Business Process Management

The Product of Poor Data Quality: Valuable Products?
2007-11-16 13:33:00
Whether your are new to the discipline of Data Quality or an old pro, you’ll likely have heard, over-and-over, that poor data quality leads to an overall poor value of the data and ultimately poor decision making. This is certainly a good point and I have no argument with it. I would like to point out, however, that there have been times when poor data quality, mistakes, and little quality assurance has led to quite valuable products. Submitted solely for your entertainment, here are some examples of the high value of poor quality. (more…)
More About: Products , Product , Poor

Getting started
2007-11-02 14:40:00
When starting a new initiative as large as Data Governance, it often helps to show its benefits. The problem with this is that when you are first starting, the benefits you are touting are merely theoretical to those you are trying to sell because nothing has actually happened yet. When my data governance program was started we never mentioned the buzz word ‘data governance’… we actually didn’t really use buzz words or try to categorize it. For us, the key was to just start a project that was fixing a major business problem. The process we developed for solving these problems became the Data Governance program. (more…)

The Death of Dirty Data
2007-11-01 13:07:00
Check out the article “The Death of Dirty Data ” published in The Canadian Underwriter (of all places). It is really well written and focuses on data quality, data governance, and data management. “Data is the foundation of practically everything that goes on in today’s organizations, and so managing the quality of data is reaching “business-critical” status.”

New Design, Your Participation, and Links
2007-10-19 14:45:00
New Design You’ve probably noticed by now that we switched up the site design earlier this week. We’ve gone with a cleaner look so that the focus is clearly on the content. We’ve also added some space in the sidebar to your right for advertisers. The vision for The Data Governance Blog is to grow into a valuable resource for data management professionals. That means our content will encompass learning about best practices, past experiences, industry events, vendors, and products. Your Participation “Build your resume by being a Guest Contributor” As part of our vision, we’re reaching out to you to help us grow. Would you like to be a guest contributor? Your writeups don’t have to be long or involved like traditional journals and magazines. We’re all about quick hitting information here. If you have a good tip or a past experience (good or bad) that you learned from, please contribute! Or, if you read an article recently and you...
More About: Links

What is Data Governance?
2007-10-17 13:16:00
A very interesting article was written over at the Data Strategy Journal recently - in it they attempted to simply define Data Governance . Easy task right? Not so much. Their method for getting at some definitions was to interview consultants, practitioners, and vendors and asking them to simply “define data governance”. I like the approach of asking people in different positions to define something - this almost certainly ensures diversity since their perspectives are very different. Its a bit frightening to see the many different types of answers, but I certainly understand them since the discipline is still emerging. (more…)

Divide and Conquer
2007-10-16 13:55:00
There really is something to be said about dividing up your council to work on separate issues and then reconvening to discuss and approve the results. I’ve used this technique recently for some of the issues on our tracking sheet that ‘just won’t go away’. You probably have these too… whether they be important but nagging issues with the legacy systems or a business unit who just won’t respond so you can close something out. In any case, over time, these outstanding issues will multiply and the best method I’ve found it so assign them out to your stewards to have them worked on. I’ve also found that there are a few keys to success when doing this. (more…)
More About: Conquer

If you haven’t yet subscribed…
2007-10-10 13:15:00
Please take a minute to subscribe to the blog here: Your email:   Subs cribe Unsubscribe   We’re looking to grow and need your support! I promise we won’t spam nor sell your email address.
More About: Haven , Scribe

A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality
2007-10-09 16:15:00
The last session that I wanted to write about was titled, “A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality ” and was presented by Richard Trapp from Avaya. For those of you don’t know of Avaya (I suspect most of you do, as you probably have one of their phones sitting right next to you), they ...
More About: Ality , Sine