DATA GOVERNANCE IS

VALUABLE: MOVING TO
AN OFFENSIVE STRATEGY
Data governance defines how data should be gathered and used within
an organization. That sounds boring and tedious, but data governance
is critical in today’s data-driven world. It is time to stop viewing data
governance as a necessary evil that helps combat the equally evil and
overused threats of “drowning in data,” security breaches, and compliance.
Instead, it is time to rethink why it’s imperative for data governance to be
seen as a critical catalyst of business growth.

To be sure, this is a marketing and change management challenge as much

as a data challenge. Governance can barely be mentioned without brains
quickly disconnecting. But, by better understanding how data governance
works and how it is inextricably linked to business success, organizations
can build momentum behind data governance efforts.

Data Governance Success Is Business Success

Every organization knows that data drives success. The proliferation of data
scientists, with job openings expected to grow by 36 percent in the next
decade, and rise of chief data officers (CDOs), a role invented in 2002 and
now filled at 65 percent of large organizations, proves the perceived value
of data. It’s also why global spending on advanced analytics is expected to
“gain strength over the next five years,” according to IDC.

But, when an organization then fails to achieve success, few tend to look
back at data practices as the culprit. The bad decisions, misused datasets,
and misunderstood insights that contributed to failure are overlooked while
earnings estimates are missed, stock prices dive, and managers and leaders
are reshuffled or forced to move on. Maybe they were just making good
decisions based on bad data?

Yes, data governance contributes to organizational success or failure. If

teams have higher quality data, more accurate data, and better visibility into
which data to use, how to use it, and who knows it best, better decisions will
be made. Better decisions enable success by driving value and mitigating risk.
The processes and mechanisms by which data is used — data governance —
is then foundational to business success, whether that comes in the form
of increasing efficiency, accelerating productivity, reducing costs, boosting
profitability, or achieving any other business objective.

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 Data governance is a key enabler for the data-driven
organization. Data governance allows organizations to unleash
the value of their data while enabling risk management.
- Forrester, Data Governance Solutions Landscape Report: Q4 2022

Disappointingly, barely more than one-third (36 percent) of data leaders view
data governance as a key priority to improving success through business
intelligence (BI) and analytics, according to a study by TDWI. Think about
the consequences if only one-third of CFOs saw finance and accounting
practices as critical to business success!

Data governance is similar in that it guides organizations in finding,

understanding, and protecting data so that the data can be used for better
and consistent analysis, more easily defined goals, consistent compliance,
improved data management, more standardized systems, improved data
quality, and so much more.

As these use cases indicate, data is both an asset and a liability. Yet
historically, data governance has existed to manage data as liability alone
in a defensive posture. But that’s changing. Today, wise data leaders are
wielding data governance to serve both offensive and defensive purposes.
This is a human challenge, which lies in shifting a groups’ view of data
governance as a purely defensive posture (security, control, access) to
a momentum-based offensive posture (value, benefits, growth). But make
no mistake: you can have it both ways.

What Is Data Governance?

Data governance defines how data should be gathered and used
within an organization. It address core questions, such as:
• How does the business define data?
• Where does it live?
• How accurate must the data be for use?
• Who can use it?
• How can they use it?

To learn more, read What is Data Governance and Why is it Important?

Data Governance Is Valuable: Moving to an Offensive Strategy | 3

Making Data Governance Offensive
It could be argued that many leaders already consider data governance
offensive. It’s a frequently avoided topic that conjures up fears of hours-long
working sessions and sleep-inducing planning meetings that bring career
growth to a grinding halt.

But, jokes aside, shifting from a traditionally defensive function into a blended
focus that also embraces data offense… is as simple as forcing people to
rethink the connection between data governance and organizational success.
Defensive data governance is akin to keeping the lights on: it’s not exciting
but it’s needed to enforce security, pass compliance audits, and mitigate the
risks of running afoul of regulations. Offensive data governance, by contrast,
supports competitive initiatives that can aggressively grow the business.

“Offensive data strategies focus on getting value out of data to build better
products, improve your competitive position, and improve profitability,” says
Bob Seiner, president and principal at KIK Consulting. “Defensive strategies
focus more on risk mitigation, data security, and regulatory compliance.”

Defensive vs. Offensive Data Governance

Defensive data strategy focuses on minimizing risk. Offensive data
strategy supports business objectives. Here’s how they differ:

Defense! Offense!
Puts the data governance focus on: Aims data governance at:

• Regulatory compliance mandates • Gaining insight about

like data privacy and financial customer needs.
reporting.
• Integrating customer and
• Detecting and mitigating risk of market data for planning future
fraud and theft. business goals.
• Identifying, standardizing, and • Supporting the sales and
governing authoritative data marketing pipelines.
sources.
• Operational efficiency and
process improvement.

To learn more, read Building a Data Governance Strategy in 7 Steps.

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Of course, data governance will always have some focus on risk, security, and
compliance. But that’s simply table stakes in today’s world. And it fails to take into
account the true value data governance efforts can bring to the rest of the business.

Rethinking the Power of Governance

Do you remember, before the iMacs and iPhones, when design teams were
driven by committees of engineers and accountants? Now, the design teams
are in the driver’s seat. That’s the type of fundamental change needed to
move data governance from a defensive to offensive posture. But moving
data governance to the offensive requires a few tactics to challenge
conventional thinking and force stakeholders across the organization to
rethink the power, role, and purview of data governance.

For example, forward-thinking organizations are starting to merge domains

and categories to include everything from the mechanisms of data fabrics and
meshes and clouds to the responsibilities of DataOps. This emergent category,
termed Data Intelligence and Governance (DI&G), combines data visibility with
data control. This wider perspective enlightens data users by consolidating the
offensive information around what data is available and where the data comes
from, while also enabling defensive guardrails to be placed easily around the
data for control and governance.

In this sense, the focus of governance changes from locking the data away
to enforcing accountability while guiding people toward trusted data and the
appropriate, compliant behaviors for using it.

What Data Governance Is NOT

Many people have preconceived notions (and bad experiences)
informing their ideas about what governance is or should be. Kick off
your initiative by putting those bad memories to rest.

Data governance is NOT: Data governance is:

• A data jail • A business enabler

• A punishment mechanism • A way to increase productivity
• A reason to fear data • A path to trusted data (and
better business relationships)
• A thing we do just for
compliance audits • A painkiller for analysts, data
engineers, and all data users

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The Critical Role of Metadata
To take advantage of data to its fullest potential, organizations need to know
details about the data. That comes through metadata, which helps describe,
classify, and provide context on data so the related data can be easily found,
cataloged, and put to work. This context helps teams answer the five W’s of
data: who, what, when, where, and why. Metadata-driven technology can then
serve at the center of data offense and data defense. But, metadata also needs
to be easily accessible, constantly updated, and instantly sharable to drive value.

An organization that is pioneering in its approach to offensive data governance

is Crocs, a world leader in innovative casual footwear. Improving its speed-to-
insight is a critical part of the governance team’s job at Crocs, which relies
on a data catalog to capture, manage, and elevate metadata to achieve
broader business benefits such as:

• Aligning data definitions with consistent terminology and

a central resource for assessing and understanding KPIs across the
business units to ensure quality control, global alignment,
and comprehension.

Data Governance Is Valuable: Moving to an Offensive Strategy | 6

 • Growing adoption of Microsoft Power BI by enabling users to
better understand the context and origin of the data they analyze.

• Accelerating change management from three months to less than

a week through data lineage insights that allow teams to trace data
to its original source and owner.

• Supporting cloud migration to the Snowflake cloud data

warehouse by identifying and cataloging data that can be deleted
due to lack of use.

For data to be valuable, organizations need metadata to describe, understand,

and catalog it. For metadata to be valuable, it has to be accessible. As data
governance grows in importance, organizations need a platform that leverages
metadata, makes data accessible, and is intuitive for users across the organization.

Types of Metadata
Metadata helps users find the data they need, see an inventory of
available data, and evaluate the data’s fitness for intended uses.
Metadata includes things like:

• Descriptive information such as title, purpose, creation date,

and creator
• Structural information such as how data is formatted, with
information on tables, pages, types, and relationships
• Administrative information such as access permissions, locations,
file size, and ownership information
• Reference information such as information on quality, sources,
processes used, schemas, and formulas

To learn more, read Top 5 Best Practices for Metadata Management.

Rallying Support for a Data Governance Offensive

Putting data governance on the offensive is a marketing and change
management challenge as much as a data challenge, as mentioned above.
Communication is key, but so is a well thought-out and articulated plan.

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The place to begin is where all organizational projects begin: with the
business justification. By tying data governance from the start to business
results, stakeholders can be focused on the expected outcome of success
rather than the governance mechanism required to get there.

Greg Swygart, VP, enterprise data office, Fifth Third Bank, says, “We realized
that centralized, traditional data governance had somewhat of a bad brand.”
To shift perception, his team rebranded key data governance terms.

Making small changes to the words you use in governance initiatives can have a big impact
on how people respond. Source.

Under Swygart’s leadership, “data governance” became “data management”

while “subject matter experts” became “data management mavens.” People
are no longer assigned governance tasks — they’re recognized for critical
data management work. These small changes can shift the conversation
in a big way and encourage people to embrace the change.

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Financial justifications for data governance should also connect tightly with
key organizational goals. For example, an objective to accelerate time-
to-market can be supported with data analyst productivity increases that
deliver more accurate insights to decision makers in less time. Or, a goal of
improving business agility can be achieved by improving the accuracy and
timeliness of business KPI dashboards across the organization.

Every organization is different, too, so understanding the best approach

depends on what works best. A human-centered approach focuses on
building a data culture. A technology-forward approach puts the technological
foundation in place first to make data governance an integral part of the
data infrastructure. With this foundation set up, leaders can then turn to
driving a human approach and emphasizing data culture.

Taking the Human Angle

Data culture is a people-first organizational attitude that promotes data-driven
decision making. Evidence and reason are valued above all else. Organizations
with a data culture, combined with an offensive data governance strategy,
win out against slower-moving consensus cultures and myopic hierarchical
cultures. According to Forrester Research, organizations with an insights-driven
culture are nearly three-times more likely to have double-digit growth.

So how do you integrate data governance into a data culture? Look to

success stories, examples, and connecting real people to real data-driven
results. Offense-focused governance replaces rules and limitations with
guidelines and solutions, so that people quickly begin to shift their own
perspectives, too.

“The term governance smacks of edicts handed down from above and dusty
documents that no one reads,” says Sebastian Kaus, Data Governance Lead
at Vattenfall. “But a thriving data culture must be grown from the bottom up.
And that starts with listening to people.”

Companies with a strong data culture — one where people feel confident
in their ability to find, use, and trust data — are more likely to meet or exceed
their revenue targets. Here are some tips in crafting a people-first approach
to offensive data governance:

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 • Executive buy-in is critical. There needs to be a clear understanding
of how data drives revenue, even with the executives.

• Technology exists to support people. Technology won’t create

a data culture.

• Invest in training. Remember that not everyone is a data scientist.

• Start small. Focus on a single area of the business and then

broadcast that success to create momentum.

• Create “data evangelists.” Let them spread the word to other data
scientists and analysts throughout the organization.

• Build a community. Find, engage with, and celebrate those who

are super passionate about data and data culture.

To learn more about building a data culture, read Accelerating Your Data
Culture Journey: Customer Best Practices in Data Governance.

Putting Technology Forward

Using technology to reign in processes, provide easy access to information,
and guide the business to the best data helps create a foundation for an
offensive data governance strategy. But it’s important to shift the role of
technology from command and control to enablement, access, and speed.
Data governance can then facilitate processes that help drive sales, gather
competitive intelligence, launch new products, and more

Before governance can take the offensive, however, a technology-forward

data governance foundation must be implemented. This requires solutions
which can locate and track data and usage, capture and pull value from the
accompanying metadata, and empower teams to find the information they
need. Here are some tips for deploying a technology-forward approach to
offensive data governance:

• Identify and prioritize existing data by creating an inventory of

data, classifying it, and organizing it.

• Choose a metadata storage solution to collect metadata from

across platforms and that provides easy, centralized visibility.

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 • Prepare and transform the metadata to ensure consistent
formatting and terminology, and use templates to ease the
transformation.

• Build a data governance model that encourages innovation and

takes a proactive approach to achieving data governance goals.

• Establish a process to democratize data with policies that are

embedded into people’s normal activities, workflows, and tools.

• Identify potential risks based on relevant laws, compliance

requirements, and security threats.

• Constantly adapt the data governance framework to respond

to issues and challenges as they emerge.

To learn more about building a technology-forward data governance

foundation, read Building a Data Governance Strategy in 7 Steps.

Data Governance Supports Data Quality

By following these steps, data leaders can build data quality processes into
their governance framework. This requires a metadata storage solution,
also called a data catalog or data intelligence platform. This platform can
effectively capture the wisdom of crowds to support organizational data
literacy. It can also propagate data quality warnings to downstream users
affected by upstream changes.

Data quality is too vast a challenge to tackle in a silo. Thus, data management
use cases are converging — driven by platforms that support data quality,
lineage, security, and governance workflows and connect to a broad range
of data source connections. These platforms automate learning systems
with AI and ML to describe data and support smarter human collaboration.

In this way, data quality and data governance are closely linked. Data
governance helps users to correctly (and compliantly) leverage quality
data to deliver value to their organizations. Data quality is a critical aspect
of governance, as it supports superior analysis, consistent regulatory
compliance, and overall improved data management.

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The Best Offense is a Data Catalog
Data governance is traditionally defensive. But emphasizing risk mitigation
and compliance alone can relegate governance to a back-office support
role. Business leaders may dismiss a strictly defensive governance posture as
a necessary evil that adds friction to organizational momentum and blocks
progress. At its worst, defensive governance relies on IT and ever-expansive
policies to solve governance challenges with roadblocks over accelerators.
When data policies are developed in silos, those policies neglect the potential
business impact and the business looks for workarounds.

Let’s be clear: Many governance functions dismissed as pure defense actually

support a smarter offense. Take access controls as an example. This is
a critical pillar of data security and governance because it controls who can
access what information. Setting correct access enables the right people
to get the most out of the data compliantly. Getting this right the first time
prevents people from accessing data they shouldn’t, such as PII (and protects
businesses from hefty regulatory fines). It also delivers the right amount of
information to people according to their role. A business leader doesn’t need
to know the code, sensitive, private data, or SQL queries behind a dataset.
And why would they? Concealing certain elements of that data with access
controls isn’t just a compliance mandate — it’s an efficiency booster.

This example illustrates a key theme: Data governance has expanded

to support a wide range of use cases, including collaboration, metadata
management, data quality, data sharing — the list goes on. That means
that modern data leaders don’t have to choose between offense and
defense — they can do both.

Blending data governance to also embrace offensive tactics can deliver

quality, curated data to the business. A blended strategy puts community
building and business experts at the forefront so they can demonstrate
how to use data as a competitive asset. These data evangelists focus on
improving the organization’s effectiveness, optimizing operations, and
driving business outcomes — all by using data intelligently.

An offensive-and-defensive data governance strategy requires a platform

for data consumers to find, understand, and use data appropriately. A data
catalog is that broker between the data consumer and the data producers,
ensuring the right data is easily accessible and quickly understood. Popular

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data catalog examples include Amazon, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Google,
where consumer-driven data — reviews, content, clicks, etc. — create
crowdsourced tribal knowledge that those sites then make easily
accessible to raise the collective IQ of their audiences.

Imagine if finding data for a critical work project was as easy as searching
for it on Amazon. Results would appear, star ratings and reviews could be
evaluated, questions could be asked, and it would be much easier to find
the best data for the task at hand. That’s an enterprise data catalog.

However, for a catalog to be successful, it must connect to everything

and be used by everyone — it needs a data culture. Data cultures help
organizations make better decisions, faster, which helps teams “enjoy
increased revenue, improved customer service, best-in-class operating
efficiencies, and improved profitability.” A data culture also helps organizations
attract and retain the best employees, increase employee satisfaction,
and increase buy-in on company plans.

To get started, visit alation.com to learn more about building a data culture
and putting data governance on the offensive.

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