Tom Breur
June 2009
Introduction
When you mention words like “compliance” or “corporate governance”,
most senior executives that I know start to cringe. It’s not popular,
and it’s not sexy, but you just can’t get around it. It is like going to the
dentist: nobody likes it, but the alternative of letting your teeth rot is
definitely a lot worse.
Now you bring up “data governance”, and guess what? Nobody’s
cheering. Or worse. Everybody around you has something else to do
all of a sudden, and the last person you found yourself with at the
cocktail party has this urgent calling to go floss his cat at home…
So is data governance something that only business intelligence (BI)
or data warehouse (DWH) professionals care for? Have we failed
dismally to communicate the value that data holds in and of itself,
apart from the primary business process that generated it?
There are (at least) two reasons why data governance is, or at least
should be of importance. First of all, regulatory compliance demands
authentic reporting. Not just under the Sarbanes-Oxley act (SOX),
which applies to US listed corporations. More broadly, accountability
and traceability of data is quickly becoming the norm. If big decisions
ride on data from your BI systems, don’t you need to ascertain these
numbers can indeed be trusted?
|
