by Anjan Roy

Created on: June 26, 2009

Data governance is the formal orchestration of people, processes, and technology to enable an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset. Since it is a strategic initiative involving multiple functions across the enterprise, a data governance program should include a governing body (steering committee or council), an agreed upon common set of procedures, and a plan to communicate and execute those procedures.

It is the framework, i.e. the set of processes and policies that define the roles and responsibilities, activities, tasks and models that involve around the overall enterprise data management. One of the main components of Data Governance is Master Data Management. Master Data Management (MDM) is a method of organizing the master data such that the processes, repositories and the services are all integrated across the organization. This gives a complete and unique view of the data repositories across the organization. The common problem faced is that the data repositories are not standardized across corporations. Since the master data is used across divisions of a company, problems with the data are manifested everywhere. Some of the benefits of a well-maintained Master Data Repository are shown below.

a. Single Version of Truth The entire organization views a single version of the Master Data thereby helping in better business decisions making.

b. Better Business Intelligence Allows true global reporting capabilities including drill downs to the lowest level of entities: e.g. customer volume, product volume, key customer accounts, performance of customers/products

c. Operational Efficiencies Since the data captured once is correct and complete according to data standards it improves business process accuracy. It also saves data maintenance costs in terms of reduced duplication of effort, data consolidations and
ad hoc quality control activities

d. Application Integration Single version of truth shared globally makes common platform applications easier to create and maintain with reduced overheads for data interpretations across divisions of the company

e. Compliance The data is standard, documented and compliant. The changes are easily traceable across all the business processes. Role based security is easy to implement on a standardized data repository.

The presence of well-documented data standards and a strong governance process is the subject of analysis in this domain. These are the cornerstones of high quality data available to the entire

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