Data Management: a gentle introduction. Bas van Gils
between business units on the one hand, and a central body on the other.
The DMBOK also advocates an approach to governance that uses data stewardship as a cornerstone. Data stewardship is defined as “a label to describe accountability and responsibility for data and processes that ensure effective control of data assets”. This definition is abstract. A more informal definition would be: data stewards are those people who (hands-on) take care of data assets across the enterprise and therefore are assigned accountability and responsibility for those data assets.
The last topic that is mentioned is policy-making. Policies codify general principles and rules with respect to the use of data assets. Typically, this includes such things as formal roles and responsibilities2, procedures for handling data quality issues, and rules for data classification.
Data governance is a big topic that requires many roles across the organization to collaborate. The DMBOK lists several roles that contribute to effective DG, including business executives, data owners/ stewards, architects, compliance teams, other governance bodies, and data professionals. How to set this up properly is discussed in several chapters in part II of this book.
■ 9.4 A MODERN APPROACH TO DATA GOVERNANCE
The modern approach to data governance is based on three roles and is illustrated in figure 9.2. These roles are as follows:
• Data owner - The data owner is the person who is ultimately accountable for a data set. The data owner ensures that data is fit for the purpose of the people who want to use it. As a rule of thumb, data ownership lies where data is created, as this is the only place where its correctness can be verified. This is illustrated in example 21.
• Data user - The data user is the person who wants to use/ uses data. Typically, the data user negotiates with the data owner about data access. Common topics are: what (types of) data does the user wish to use? What are data definitions? What are data quality requirements?
• Data steward - The data steward is the person with hands-on responsibility for managing the data. Data stewards tend to have a mixed business/ IT background3. Both the data owner and the data user tend to have management positions. Therefore, people in these roles tend to be supported by data stewards, as shown in figure 9.2.
Example 21. Assigning data ownership
Suppose we are looking for the data owner for the “product” business concept in a company that produces electronics. New products tend to be defined by the Product Development Department. The decision to actually move forward in launching new products together with the opinion of other departments (e.g. Marketing) are of course considered, but ultimately the accountability for new products lies with this department. Therefore, someone in this department should also be designated the data owner role for the “product” business concept.
Note that this approach to data governance addresses only one piece of the puzzle: it deals with the accountability of data assets but does not address the over-arching issues such as policymaking and alignment. As such, this approach should always be complemented by other approaches to achieve a sufficient level of data governance maturity.
Figure 9.2 illustrates this way of thinking. The top of the diagram is all about coordination between different organizational roles. This is where the actual governance activities happen: data owners and data users, supported by data stewards, negotiate the use of data. The bottom part of the diagram signifies the storage and flow of data in such a way that the agreement is met.
Figure 9.2 Data governance model
Several questions remain, such as: how do you find good data owners and data stewards? How do they perform their role effectively? The theme here is non-invasive data governance which will be explained in more detail in part II – in chapter 25 – of this book.
■ 9.5 POSITION OF DATA GOVERNANCE
I will close this chapter with a brief discussion of the position of data governance in the organization, especially in relation to other governance processes in the organization. I often hear arguments along the lines of “Data resides in our systems, so data must be an IT thing. As a consequence, data governance should fall under the jurisdiction of IT governance”. There is some merit to this position but only if you believe that data/ data management is an IT topic. I tend to disagree.
As explained in this book, I believe data to be a topic of its own and one that should not be positioned as yet another IT topic. Consider once more figure 9.2. The top layer of this diagram shows governance activities from a data perspective, using the ownership/ stewardship model. This is intended to govern the data in the systems, not the systems themselves. This would be the realm of IT governance which has its own models and frameworks for governance, most notably COBIT (see e.g. [ISA12]). As processes, data, and systems are all important, so are their governance activities and I believe that they should co-exist. Governance activities should complement each other and should therefore be coordinated. The way this works best really depends on the local setting and culture of the organization: there is no single optimum answer to that problem.
■ 9.6 VISUAL SUMMARY
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers, last checked; 12 June 2019.
2 Typically in the form of a RACI matrix. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix. Last checked: 12 June 2019.
3 It is hard to find people with this dual background. As an alternative, many organizations work with stewardship duos: a business data steward paired to an IT data steward.
Synopsis - Metadata is defined as “data about data”. In this chapter, I will discuss three types of metadata: business, technical, and operational metadata. I will also show that metadata is foundational for all data management/ data governance activities. Last but not least, I will offer some theoretical considerations on how to set up a metadata repository.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив