I had a most interesting conversation with an end user yesterday. He works in the pharmaceutical field and we discussed a problem in his organization. There was an information governance board set up that reviewed rules, periodically, that dictate how IT would gather data from a range of different source business applications in order to harmonize the data in preparation for dropping into a data warehouse. The outcome would be good, clean data, to drive business insight (otherwise known as reports, dashboards and KPIs). All good, so far.
But when asked, “How is the stewardship going?”, the user had to admit to a major problem. A problem that, in my mind, sums up 2013 (and I have said this before). He mentioned that “we have a lot of work to do in the area of information governance”. He went on to explain that the IG team does not yet work with the application/process leadership team. In other words, the so called IG team was not an operational, business led IG team. It may have been business led, but it was operating offline, not part of day to day operations, because it was concerned with data in a downstream warehouse. It was not focused on the operational data in the core business systems. If it had been, it would be the same team that was described as the “application/process leadership team”.
This the conclusion: IG is not a separate discipline that operates outside and independent of business operations (applications and process types). It is part of the same – and it only exists because that group needs the help of information (governance) to make what they do, do what they mean. So the bottom line for 2013 remains (as I said at our global MDM summits in the Spring), “making IG stick”.
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