Carl Gerber: Best Practices in Enterprise Data Governance

In this podcast, Carl Gerber and Wayne Eckerson discuss Gerber’s top five data governance best practices: Motivation, Assessment, Data Assets Catalog, CxO Alliance, and Data Quality.

Gerber is a long-time chief data officer and data leader at several large, diverse financial services and manufacturing firms, who is now an independent consultant and an Eckerson Group partner.

He helps large organizations develop data strategies, modernize analytics, and establish enterprise data governance programs that ensure data quality, operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and business outcomes. He also mentors and coaches Chief Data Officers and fills that role on an interim basis.

Key Takeaways

  • There’s a distinct difference between master data, transactions, and metadata
  • To get traction for a data governance program it needs to be specific to the business
  • Organizations without data governance programs often lack key capabilities
  • Businesses often build data quality controls over and over again
  • A data governance counsel is essential to a data governance program
  • IT plays an important role in data governance

The following is a transcription of two questions and answers from the podcast

Wayne Eckerson: How do you go about understanding the current state of your data landscape?

Carl Gerber: That’s through a series of joint up conversations. I do have a framework where there are certain things I want to look at. I want to do an assessment of the data platforms that every enterprise should have. We’ve spoken at length about master data management. There’s also financial reference data management, which is very important, and other platforms across the end-to-end lifecycle for managing your data. For example, do we have a data archive capability? If we don’t, we are likely having extra expenses because we are keeping around systems because just we want to query the data and we don’t have an archive capability.

I’ve mentioned this word capability. So capability is a combination of these data platforms and skilled people who know how to use them and applying them against the known issues and biggest challenges. By looking at the data platforms and level of maturity and the operations around them, say a data quality capability, for example, you’ll be able to understand what the data management maturity level is. You’ll also find if there are accountable executives and responsible data stewards who are really going to do something about the data quality that could be causing blockers to your business.

Wayne Eckerson: In your experience are there any capabilities that are typically missing in an organization that has yet to develop a data governance program, either on the technology, data, or people side?

Carl Gerber: Yes, I find that there’s either missing or misaligned or many silos of the same capabilities. So, there’s usually room for operational efficiencies.

But I mentioned the data archive capability that’s often overlooked. Other capabilities are a data quality platform. Often I find that data quality controls are being custom built, and they’re being built over and over and over again because you don’t have a unified data quality platform that makes it very easy to profile the data at your early stages of tech ops initiatives. And be able to have a data quality dashboard so your data stewards can track and continuously improve the data quality that’s within their realm. Those are a few of the platforms.

Another one that is usually scattered all around in spreadsheets and/or other applications, like a configuration management database, is a cohesive data catalog. And when I talk about data catalog, I tend to include business glossaries and data dictionaries; all that metadata that’s usually all around and not gathered together in one place and not very accessible to the entire enterprise. And then, of course, the data catalog is an inventory of all of your assets, both your structured and unstructured data. Those are what I usually find as the gaps, or lower on the maturity scale at the beginning of these kinds of transformative efforts.

Wayne Eckerson

Wayne Eckerson is an internationally recognized thought leader in the business intelligence and analytics field. He is a sought-after consultant and noted speaker who thinks critically, writes clearly and presents...

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