Overview of Data Governance in Business
Overview of Data Governance in Business
Abstract. Taking into account the amount of information that is currently handled in business
contexts, it is mandatory to develop a good data governance program. It guarantees that all the
information is available to the company when it needs it, as it needs it and where it needs it.
Through this data governance, the main goal is to increase profits, decrease costs, improve
knowledge management and interact with customers, suppliers, employees and processes.
Besides, this type of programs are not only part of a section in the company, but also they must
have a transversal collaboration to all the technology and business teams. During the first stage
of this research, it seeks to perform a review of the state of the art on the data governance. It
allows to unify criteria through a reference item later, to provide a tool that helps companies to
support the information necessities through the development of data governance projects that
respond to business needs and strategic decision making.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, organizations are changing all the time. Effective decisions play an important and decisive
role in front of competition. It implies a series of attributes of the information quality. It has to be
precise, coherent, consistent, available, easy and immediate accessible, but the variety of formats and
the volume of data in the business contexts have grown considerably in the last years. It is due to
current companies work online worldwide and accumulate a huge amount of information, mainly
about their products, goods, services, customers and their behavior. On the other hand, companies add
unconventional information from social networks, multimedia, heterogeneous data sources and many
of these are unstructured ones.
Consequently, the complexity of the information is meaningful and companies need to find
strategies to organize, manage and rule information as an income of the company and can be used as
an input that supports business strategies. Data governance is an important variable in strategic
management within a corporate government, and it must follow its principles [1]. An efficient data
governance can help people of an organization to create a clear mission, increase confidence in the use
of the organization's data, establish roles and responsibilities, quantifiable principles and indicators
[2]. More and more organizations have realized the growing importance of controlling their data.
However, there is a growing focus on data governance aspects to ensure security, high quality and
better data management [3]. Nevertheless, there is no single standard or approach for the
implementation of data governance programs in organizations nowadays [4][5].
During the initial stage, this research goal is focused on showing a review of the state of the art,
which allows an analysis to unify criteria by means of a reference model in order to guide companies
in the implementation of data government projects.
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Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1
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Data governance and data management are different, the second one refers to the implementation
of the decisions made about architecture level, policies and procedures in order to improve and
manage the life cycle of the data in a specific context.
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
main risks that can cause the data governance initiative failures and decide how to decrease them: the
risks can be aspects such as lack of explicitness about business processes, lack of participation of
business representatives, among others. Defining the team in charge of the master data and who are
involved in the project is necessary. The government of data should be designed according to the
company policies: it means that, if a company decides in a decentralized manner for each field of
business, it is suitable to implement a data governance in the same way. Although the government is
decentralized, decisions should be taken centrally, but the business data can be taken in a decentralized
manner.
5. Data domains
The information architecture, according to [23], describes the principles and guidelines that allow a
coherent implementation of information technology solutions: how data and information are ruled and
shared in the company, as well as, what it needs to guarantee information confidence. There are
several types of data that can be used in each business lines. The data can be structured or unstructured
and it can also be viewed from a perspective of how it is stored. In [23] it explains, how to divide
business information into 5 domains, according to the use and format of the information within a
company. The domains are: metadata, master, operational, unstructured and analytical data.
Metadata is defined as "data on data". It is the information to describe the characteristics of each
piece of corporate data and other entities. The master data refers to the data instances that explain the
main commercial entities, such as customer and product data. Operational data is also known as
transactional data. They are derived from day-to-day business transactions. Unstructured data, also
known as content is usually managed by a business content management application. Analytical data
is usually derived from the transformation of operational systems to address the specific requirements
of decision support applications [23].
6. Reference models
Data governance expresses how the organization manages all the data and information that is
transversal to all its processes [24]. It is not a one-time project, but a constant program. The reference
models provide a set of tools and guides that help organizations through the implementation of data
governance projects to get their business goals.
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of data governance has to be checked, and the results showed periodically to the executive promoters
[6].
Data principles. Data principles establish the link with the business. To align it with the use of the
data, its principles set up its measurement as an asset of the company and define which are the specific
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
policies, standards and appropriate guidelines. Data principles also establish and foster opportunities to
share and reuse it. Each one is supported by a fundamental reason and a set of implications [7].
Metadata. It is defined as "data on data". It provides a mechanism to obtain a concise and coherent
description of the data. It helps to understand the meaning or semantics of the data [7].
Data access. Accessing to data is based on the ability of participants to assign a value to different
categories. An effective risk analysis by security agents identifies the company necessities and defines
policies to ensure confidentiality, integrity and data availability [7].
Data life cycle. Being conscious about that all data moves through the stages of the life cycle is
mandatory to the design of data governance. By understanding how data is used, and how long it
should be retained, organizations can develop methods to allocate usage patterns for optimal storage
media in order to decrease the total cost of data storage during their cycle of life [7].
There are two main characteristics in the data governance imperatives classification. First,
everyone has stages which develop over time. This advance means development. Second, imperatives
as a group imply a sequence of time. For example, it is clear that imperative 1 must create an
interdisciplinary team before imperative 2 coordinates the team's objectives with the business
initiatives. Figure. 1.
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According to imperatives 3 and 4, [32] it explains: The imperative 3 must rule IT systems before
imperative 4 begins to use IT systems to automate governance processes. Although these dependencies
determine an order to begin the imperatives, they must coexist and interact. The TDWI maturity model
is showed in the Figure. 2 and it is described in Chart 2.
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
In the ad hoc stage, the company is generally behind other companies in the corresponding
information area. It is an initial phase, the company begins to develop the capacity to gather
information in its functional areas. Different from basic reports, information is not available, or it
spends time. Human efforts are usually required to gather the necessary information in order to take
daily business decisions.
In the fundamental stage, the company cannot gather the key information yet and is still behind
most of its competitors. Information is constantly not available to take business decisions and some
human effort is still required to get it. On the contrary, the competitive scenario represents companies
whose capacities in gathering information is online, like most of similar companies. This level of
maturity is also the starting point to establish a certain consistency in the main business metrics in the
company.
In the differentiating stage, a company whose commercial strategies are carried out through the use
of information is considered better than most other companies in its sector. Management has the
ability to be adapted to commercial changes. Business leaders and users have the opportunity to get
the main information and the respective metrics so as to take effective decisions.
Finally, when a company is in the breaking stage, it is generally considered as the best in executing
key business strategies. The information is used in the company for multidimensional decision and key
indicators of predictive performance are used to model the results.
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
IBM developed the maturity model (Figure 5). The maturity model is the "criteria" for evaluating
and measuring progress within each of the 11 domains [30].
Figure 5. Maturity model of the IBM Data Governance Council. Adapted from [42]
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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 519 (2019) 012023 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/519/1/012023
Figure 6. Big data growth dimensions and related characteristics. Adapted from [42]
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9. Conclusions
Reference models, data domains, what it works and what it does not, should be taken into account as a
necessary tool when planning and executing a business data governance strategy or program. These
reference models are useful to organize concepts and establish a perspective about a data governance
initiative in order to fit and respond to business necessities and strategies.
A comprehensive data governance strategy should not only include a reference model, but also
maturity models, business processes and, the organizational context and culture. Maturity models
should be used as a measure of the evolution in data governance by means of the data and information
recognition with one more asset of the company or organization.
The quality of the data depends directly on a comprehensive strategy of data governance and
without it, the objectives, strategies, business indicators cannot be defined, understood, communicated
and measured properly.
There are several reference and maturity models as proposals for planning and executing data
governance programs. They are different based on their characteristics but complementary at the same
time. Each proposal addresses the issue from different perspectives and equally important issues.
Consequently, if someone wants to be part of this type of program, it is necessary to review each of
the proposals, analyze and determine which of the proposals is the most appropriate or choose another
one according to the company needs.
According to the previous work, the opportunity to propose a data governance model for a specific
context is identified in order to facilitate the planning, execution and evolution of a data governance
program in high-level educational institutions.
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