Increasing competition requires more efficient business operation and faster, more agile IT organization. Similarly it increases the importance of knowing all the business processes, the related IT components and the connections and interactions between them. This means that companies today are collecting and handling more data than ever before. Still, to be able to handle and analyze the collected data and do not spend on unnecessary things, companies have to know what do they have, what it’s worth and what does it cost.

For efficient use and managing the collected data and to be able to handle changes companies have to have supportive organization procedures, capable IT tools and also changes in company culture. It also requires defining the rules, procedures and ownership of each information “area”. To sum it up, it requires the managing of the company’s data “assets”, and this is called Data Governance (DG).

Key elements of data governance
Data governance data elements

Data Governance has to deal with the managed data’s:

  • availability,
  • usability,
  • integrity (and quality),
  • security.

It is worth to note that these are not only technology related topics, but business and even legal questions (e.g. handling of personal data; „Right to be forgotten” in EU).

The tools of Data Governance include:

  • „Soft” tools
    • Business Glossary, definitions, taxonomies and ontologies
    • Process descriptions, rules (business and IT), documentations
    • Trainings
  • „Hard” tools
    • Master Data Management (MDM)
    • Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product Data Mgmt (PDM)
    • Metadata Management (business & technical)
    • Access Management (rights/policies and logging/auditing)
    • Archiving tools and processes (e.g. anonymize)
    • Catalogs (e.g. system map)
    • Data Quality Management
    • etc.

Meta Consulting helps its customers in Data Governance related assessments, strategy definition, technology and vendor selection, or even system implementation.