I recently attended a conference on data governance at which the keynote speaker suggested that data governance is completely separate from IT governance. As both a software engineer and a data management consultant, I was not sure that I could agree with that notion, and judging by some of the reaction in the audience, some others did not agree either. The application framework is tightly coupled with the information used by the applications; implementation decisions made by the application designers have significant impact on the underlying data infrastructure. And lastly, the ability to establish a fundamental enterprise architecture that enables auditability (which is of particular interest in the compliance space) requires close alignment between the IT and the information teams.
Posted February 12, 2007 6:47 AM
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David - I agree with you. The data management and IT management should not be divided. There needs to be stronger collaboration and alignment. Not more walls.
David - I agree,the flaws in data quality are, in my experience, often due to the disconnect between data governance and IT governance. There has to be a marriage between who decides what defines a customer and who architects the customer domain, or, we inevitably end up with aberrations....but, whose aberrations are they with distinct governance?
David, I guess it wouldn't be bad if it was separate AND equal. IT Governance has it's own control objective in the COBIT Framework. IBM recently came up with a service to peg a company's maturity level for data governance specifically. This seems promising.
Actually, I started scanning through the COBIT framework and was impressed by its applicability to data as well. The fact that these approaches are suitable to both IT and data is good. However, IT is still the technical side while the data is an organization's asset. So where is the line?
Data Governance at my organization is closely tied in with IT Governance. From a practical perspective, we collaborate on all of the same projects and often call on each other b/c of how interrelated our work is.
In fact Data Management is a part of IT Governance as the latter one among many other domains is also dealing with identity management and identity management without proper data classification and management can not be correctly implemented.
Best,
Bogdan
You hit the money right on the head! Too many disjointed and disparate programs slow the progression of a good, solid, and cohesive IT Governance program. This needs to be a coordinated effort from the top down! It is so refreshing to see someone point this out!
Good discussion, consider the controversy within the context of interoperability with external partners. How then to view data and IT governance as separate entities? or is this not a consideration?