Introduction

Most companies would agree that today, data is the very lifeblood of their business. It is created, maintained and exchanged through the organisation from one end to the other as part of everyday business operations. Yet for many, this invaluable asset is plagued with problems. For example, identifiers and data names are inconsistent across systems for the same data. Also subsets of the same data are often duplicated across systems, making it difficult to maintain and keep any changes to this data synchronised. Customer data, for example, may be created by front office sales personnel but it is also used in customer service, finance (e.g. billing and ledger) and in distribution. Equally, product data may be created by product development personnel but may be used in manufacturing, stores and planning. In addition, data quality problems often occur as data enters the enterprise or flows between systems, and it may also be the case that there is no complete integrated system of record on core data to support business-user reporting. Therefore, when business users require data to be integrated, they often have to manually attempt this —just to produce basic reports for operations management and/or compliance purposes. All of this is symptomatic of data that needs to be more robustly controlled and managed. The term given to managing this enterprise data problem is data governance.

This series of mini white papers defines what data governance is and then looks at the requirements that need to be met for full data governance to be implemented. Once these have been defined, I will then discuss one approach, showing how you can systematically build re-usable data services to automate the tasks needed to formally govern data on an enterprise-wide basis in order to accelerate the time to production and guarantee rock-solid data. Finally, in order to apply real technology to this problem I will also show how one specific vendor, DataFlux, is starting to address the problem of Data Governance by shipping pre-built services called Accelerators that run on the DataFlux technology platform.