It’s always sunny at DAMA

It was a beautiful, sunny day in Philadelphia. I was fortunate enough to attend the DAMA Philadelphia inaugural event of 2016. The chapter meeting was focused on data governance and brought together leading vendors, service providers, and customers that are defining how data governance is being executed today.

One of the sponsors, Data3Sixty, began the day with a discussion on collaboration to ensure lineage and governance. The topic of collaboration ranged from the top executive to the individual contributor. The need for the business and IT groups to work together in establishing and defining what governance means to their organization was also highlighted.

The topic that seemed to resonate most clearly was around ownership, accountability, and ensuring that all people who touch the data are personally responsible for the governance of the data. Building a business case for why governance is important to the executive level in a language that incorporates their metrics and performance initiatives was suggested as a solution to bring the issue to the forefront. Once a top-down adoption was accepted, governance could then be added as a performance-level responsibility for all individuals touching any data.

These conversation points matched Gartner’s Ten Steps to Information Governance. Gartner also highlights the need for governance to be owned outside of the IT organization as a key challenge. This is necessary for implementing the change required to govern the data appropriately and not to be seen as an “IT problem” but an overlaying corporate challenge.

Listening to the discussion of the panel highlighted that the entire data realm is no longer one division’s “problem” -- data is the corporate initiative of all employees. The suggestion of implementing annual performance metrics around data governance was a bold statement of how seriously organizations are taking their data quality strategies. Solving the struggles around data governance cannot rest on the shoulders of one group. It is the responsibility of everyone.

Learn how organizations around the world are approaching data governance in our 2016 global data management benchmark report. 

Download the report