There is an increasing awareness of the importance of data governance within the private and public sectors, with an emphasis on master data management and data quality. This is due to a growing awareness of the costs and risks associated with not having data under control.
To address these and other issues, ITWeb, in partnership with SCT, has put together a free executive forum on data governance, to take place on 20 May, at Southern Sun Grayston, in Johannesburg.
According to the Data Governance Institute, experts agree that data governance is critical for organisations that are serious about stopping accidental and malicious data leaks, regardless of whether it's customer information, financial data, intellectual property or trade secrets.
Bill Hoggarth, head of business intelligence at CQS Technology Holdings, says there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed; the biggest one is elevating data governance to a business-critical initiative. “This is best achieved through positioning data governance within the broader landscape of information as an asset, driving growth, competitive advantage and share-holder value,” he adds.
Director of strategic initiatives at Systems Applications Products South Africa, Simon Carpenter, agrees: “Data is not an IT problem - it is a corporate asset and needs to be owned and managed as such.”
The responsibility for accurate data resides with the business people, who both generate and consume that data, he says. IT is merely a facilitator.
In many organisations, political barriers and organisational silos get in the way of a sound approach to data management - either everyone wants to own the data, or else no one wants to own it. The result is chaos and redundancy, Carpenter adds.
SCT says the biggest challenge is building effective and deep data governance capacity. The challenge is the stage in the maturity model of data governance in the country, and in different businesses, as well as obtaining cost-effective data governance services in the midmarket.
Data management
According to Carpenter, the risks of not having data governance in place range from breaching privacy laws to missing commercial opportunities. “Given the increasing importance of managing unstructured data, metadata management is also growing in importance,” he adds.
From a technology standpoint, Carpenter is seeing a greater coherence in terms of the tools used to manage data. “From a SAP standpoint, our approach is to bring multiple tools together in a way that reduces complexity and makes it easier to use tools that address the many different facets of enterprise information management.”
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