Question

Data Management (20 points)

Data governance involves the supervision, monitoring, and control of an organization’s data assets. Its main concerns are data quality, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness of the controls. It is difficult because organizations typically have a lot of old data, which is of unknown quality.

Imagine that you must collect and assess the quality and appropriateness of data held by a large, multi-national organization. What steps you would take? Include how you would address network, security, and ethical considerations when deciding what data to collect from the company.

This is not a job you can do on your own! Explain the kinds of support you’ll need and how you will obtain resources and cooperation.

Answer 1

Data governance plays a very important role in today’s dynamic business environment because of the ever changing needs of the end consumer, therefore organizations has to make sure that the data is accurate under the guidelines / policy set by management which in turn should be handled smoothly and should be effective in nature.

Steps for Data Governance:

Step 1: Create blueprint for Strategy:

In order to have effective data governance, the team should be equipped and has the ability to develop a data governance structure which should consists of project charter and explain the roles and responsibility of all the stakeholders involved within the project.

Step 2: Top and bottom approach:

Corporate governance starts at the point of the pyramid which then passes through the below level i.e. it is imperative for the organization to have ability to give the accesses to the concerned project owner, as they are the one who monitor’s the health of the data which is confidential in nature and funded throughout their life cycle.

Step 3: Data Governance Support Team:

Roles and responsibility should be support the data governance structure i.e. Data Steward, Data Owner, Data Architect, Data Modeler, Data Analyst etc.

Step 4: Establishing Skilled Business Team:

The team should be highly skilled in the Information Technology field, as they are the one who are capable enough to understand the in depth insights of the data structure / business policies and then able to marry them with the existing business processes which in turns require re-engineering of the existing data structure which is majority of times complex in nature.

Support for Resources & Cooperation:

In order to handle the data governance effectively, it is highly recommended that the organization should re-align its internal supply chain to instil the data quality across multiple departments of the organization. The resources required from the organization to develop data governance is to have the right team members, all the stakeholders should be continued compliance with polices, creating a blueprint for developing strategies i.e. the start and end point of the project, Steering committee which have the executive rights for making high level decisions and the funds required to complete lifecycle of the project.

Coordination & cooperation plays a key role within the organization, because in order to execute the project successfully it is imperative for the project owner to showcase the ability of cooperation because to have data governance in place, the team members have to extract information from all the stakeholders from all the departments of the organization in order to consolidate the raw data & then has to refine them as per the mandate set by the top management of the organization. This in turn states that immense coordination is required at the ground level in order to understand the data in a much better way.