How Companies Must Begin Their Data Governance Program and Derive Value?
Written By: Nilesh Sapar , Delivery Director - Financial Services, Xoriant
Executives in today’s competitive business landscape understand the importance of data to yield useful insights. However, data requires constant management, upkeep, and security to provide value, therefore, disregarding it can become a liability.
And big data analytics is a flourishing market that is expected to reach $684 billion by 2030. To capitalize on this growth and derive value, organizations need a robust data and analytics strategy and a data governance implementation program.
Data-challenged firms should start their governance program immediately. But how can enterprises navigate the data governance journey?
Crafting a Solid Program for Successful Data Governance
A data governance program must be well-structured to manage both internal and external data. This comprises different stages such as sourcing, cleansing, transforming, and enhancing data to meet the organization's objectives while ensuring data ownership and ecosystem cost-effectiveness.
An effective data governance program involves sourcing relevant datasets, re-engineering, simplifying, and optimizing data management processes. Building relevant dashboards, performance metrics, and reporting helps with continual improvement.
As technology changes, the data ecosystem must adapt to increasing data quantities and velocity, interact with new organizational applications, and support on-demand data requirements for value-added projects. Such engagements may leverage AI, ML, and other modern technologies.
Customer Expectations in Data Governance Implementation
Data governance implementation isn’t easy. It is a complex and demanding task for organizations. The architecture, planning, and execution of a data governance program at the organizational level need an experienced task force team. From our experience, the common customer expectations in any data governance implementation include:
Our Guided Journey to Data Governance Excellence
As a technology partner , the first step is to collaborate with client stakeholders, business users, technology teams, operations teams, marketing, and customer support to understand the business environment. This is to make a note of the concerns, new application needs, and system upgrades.
After this step, we need to discuss, review, and prioritize results and objectives with client stakeholders and draft the program charter to achieve them. Once the outcomes are finalized and the objectives are prioritized, they will become input for the data governance program’s implementation plan. The common outcomes and objectives from the Data Governance programs typically include the following:
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From Deep Data Discovery to Analysis
The foundation of the program’s execution is the discovery phase. In this, we evaluate the current data architecture, analyze it, and document the requirements. Working with data owners and consumers, we study each data source system. We follow each data flow from origination to downstream apps, reports, and data warehouses.
The focus is to identify pain spots such as integrity, quality, data redundancy, duplication, missing master data standards, data ownership, manual reconciliation, etc. For the "to-be system," we collect specific user needs. We provide an as-is data model along with a data dictionary of current systems, which many organizations don’t have documented.
Sustainability, Extensibility?and Flexibility of Technology Platforms
Data governance projects might use existing technologies or a new technology platform. Many organizations start data projects in pockets, but they don't integrate them.
Establishing a uniform data platform in the business requires a consistent approach to all data efforts. It will enable projects to share tools, technology, and practices.
Planning end-to-end automation, the exit of expensive tools or databases, new integrated apps, etc. is easier on a single platform. Ab Initio, Informatica, IBM InfoSphere, and Talend are some of the popular tools that are used.
Alternatively, clients can also design their own data management solution. Nowadays, clients are seeking scalable, high-performing, and cost-effective open-source technology. Our approach is to create a sustainable, extendable, and adaptable technology platform that allows clients to add new projects, tools, and technologies progressively.
Drive Excellence Through Xoriant Data Governance Program
At Xoriant, based on our experiences with multiple data governance program executions, we have developed ready-to-deploy data accelerators. These Xoriant data accelerators add value across the program execution phases in terms of best practices, standardization, efficiency, productivity, quality, monitoring, and control.
Our data governance program execution methodology is our proven approach, which is a guide for planning, execution, and monitoring the program from start to finish. For each phase, it has all the details, such as tasks, tools, team roles, quality gates, documentation and deliverables, reviews and signoffs needed, etc. By being a valuable partner with three decades of expertise across industry verticals, we ensure the seamless delivery of data governance solutions.
Make your data governance program seamless with Xoriant.
Delivery Director @ Xoriant | ex-Infosys | IIMC :: Delivery excellence & Profitable growth :: Fintech, Payments, Financial Services :: Transformational, Modernization & Traditional Techs
1 年Very well articulated as always Nilesh Sapar. The fact that this data governance framework is already helping some of our BFS clients post implementation is a testimony of the robustness and utility of this framework.