Mary Knox here. Conversations over the last three weeks have once again come back to the issue: where should the individual or team ultimately responsible for enterprise data governance reside, and to what part of the organization should they report up through?
In researching the role and placement of data governance (Setting Responsibility for Risk and Performance Data, Centralization and Market Data: Making Architecture Design Choices Meet Business Requirements), we’ve seen various approaches, each one having strengths and weaknesses. These range from:
- Various lines of business like wealth management
- Not being line of business neutral, these create data assets that are – even if not intentionally – optimized for their particular purposes or at least perceived as being so
- IT
- They are line of business neutral, so they avoid that problem, but data is first and foremost a business issue
- IT lacks the intimate business context of data sources and uses
- The CFO
- Has strong enforcement capabilities
- CFO-lead initiatives, at least in financial services, may be too cost focused and rigid
- The COO
- Has intimate of the operational sources and uses of data
- May lack the broader strategic context
- The CRO
- Understands the risk related uses of data
- Usually lacks the enforcement clout of a CFO, and lacks understanding of the other utilizations for the data
- The CMO
- Has intimate familiarity with the market use
- Lacks enforcement clout and credibility outside of marketing – for example, they have a very different definition of acceptable data quality compared to the finance function given their very different purposes
- The strategic planning office
- Has familiarity with strategic uses of data, the future direction of the firm, and can benefit from knowing what various approaches to data and data technologies can enable in terms of business models and offerings
- Lacks intimacy with day-to-day operational data sources and uses.
What have you seen work and not work? What do you see as the benefits and risks of various placements? Please share your experience and take our survey. I’ll post the survey results in a blog within the next week or so.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Sean // Nov 6, 2008 at 2:15 pm
“Data” Governance is a subset of “Corporate” Governance. Being a good “corporate citizen” means promoting a companies success while protecting it’s assets. That said, The conservator of data or information, is the business. The data organizer and delivery enabler is IT. So it is hard to define who should own the oversight. If data is operational in nature (it’s there and it’s in use) whether for strategic or tactical purposes it should therefore be under the Chief Operating Officer. But the oversight committee should engage the business to be responsible in the oversight and should also engage IT to provide better services to improve oversight granularity while reducing the cost of the oversight.
2 Mary Knox // Nov 12, 2008 at 10:39 am
Thank you Juan and Sean for your responses. This really is a difficult issue. One other consideration is a pragmatic one — who within the firm 1) is willing to accept oversight responsibility and dedicate significant effort to it, and 2) will be accepted as both competent (by both the business and technology communities) and as acting in the best interest of the firm (instead of the best interest of him/herself or the best interest of his/her business unit).
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