Demonstrating Value

Guidance by Gwen
Demonstrating Value

Everything an organization does should tie to one of three universal value drivers

Increase revenue and value
Manage cost and complexity
Support Risk Management and Compliance efforts, and increase confidence.

Data Governance efforts MUST tie back to one or more of these drivers.
And YOU must communicate how it does.

Here are some of the ways a Data Governance effort can benefit you :

Increase revenue / value of assets

Improve the value of the company to those who would acquire it
Create "sellable" information products
Utilize information assets to make new sales
Utilize data to achieve new business capabilities
Better understand customers
Better understand product (and other) hierarchies

Reduce costs

Reduce duplicate data and its costs
Reduce duplicate data management processes (example: costs of data modeling, data administration, data quality)
Reduce likelihood of errors and associated costs (in software development, report development, information interpretation) due to lack of understanding of data or poor quality data

Support Compliance While Reducing Costs

Achieve compliance goals
Avoid cost of penalties associated with non-compliance
Avoidance of reputational hit (brand impact)
Avoid higher audit fees due to lack of confidence in "authoritative data"
Reduce management attestation/certification costs
Reduce costs of pre-audit testing

Support Impact Analysis

Increase ability to do useful impact analysis (by providing authoritative business rules, system of record information, and data lineage metadata)
Provide a capability to assess cross-functional impacts of data-related decisions

Help Align Efforts

Assist business teams (Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Security, and Privacy) to articulate their data-related business rules and requirements to IT, Architecture, and Data Management teams
Consider requirements and controls in an integrated fashion
Avoid "undoing" work or rendering controls invalid
Craft cross-functional accountabilities

Improve Data Repositories

Provide accountability and support
Reduce likelihood of architectural decisions
Increase ability to find authoritative information quickly

Improve Confidence in Data

Increase confidence in data-related decisions
Increase ability to make timely data-related decisions (this can affect time-to-market for projects and applications)
Increase confidence in data appearing in financial and management reports
Increase confidence in data strategy by providing a cross-functional team to weigh in on key decisions