Mastering Data Management

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Survey says we have miles to go before we get to widespread data governance success

We're starting a new quarter and it seems like a good time to evaluate how we're doing in the realm of Data Governance. It's good to sit back and take inventory of life now and then, just like spring cleaning.

There's nothing special about Q3. But we just released our Data Governance Survey results from last winter, and it seems like as good a time as any to share some of the results.

It's also opportune, since I'm preparing to give the same four-part webinar on Agile Data Governance that I did last fall, with Larry Dubov and Jill Dyche helping out again. (View the recording of Agile Data Governance is the “New Black” at your leisure.) And I just did a little road show with David Loshin on MDM and DG, where we gave out the survey results to participants. It's a good time for sharing.

I'd like to ask you: How good a job is your organization doing with data governance? Do you have a successful, ongoing, productive, effective DG program? Are you involving business leadership in making declarations of principle, policy, procedure etc? Is it both top-down and bottom-up? Are the results measurable?

If you're like most of the nearly 100 organizations who participated in the survey, most of you do not have a formal, functioning data governance program, and your executives do not have much interest in participating in such an initiative.

For those who do have data governance programs, they are somewhat ineffective and produce mediocre policies and guidance. Most of these are being led by mid-level managers in IT - not by the business leaders who alone have the authority to make DNA-level changes in corporate behavior, philosophy, politics, rewards and processes.

As I've stated in prior blogs, we who are advocates of data governance have done a poor job of communicating its value to the business.

In the area of DG maturity, we found that of the 85% of respondents that actually had any type of data governance program, nearly a quarter of those were in the early stages, and almost a third were in some state of forming repeatable processes, while less than 10% were actually performing well.

We asked how many companies had defined principles and policies that address the business rationale for data quality. Just 5% said they had, while 45% have no such documents. The rest had "something" in the works.

When asked about writing procedures, the numbers were about the same. Of the 85% of companies doing something in data governance, only half of them were writing policies and procedures, but only 8-10% of them had actually had declarations of any impact.

By my math, that comes out that only 5-8 companies out of nearly 100 had any meaningful data governance directives.  Wow...

Sixty percent of respondents said they were using some kind of data governance framework, with less than 20% leveraging an external framework and the rest making up their own. Why can't we learn from each other on what works and what doesn't work in data governance?

When asked about how well data stewards were working with each other and under the direction of their data governance board, almost two thirds said their data stewards were either not working together at all, or that they were only barely aware of each other within the organization.

It is pretty clear that there is little oversight and cross-organizational governance that filters down in the day-to-day jobs of data stewards. Only 20% of data stewards usually work from policies that came from a data governance board, where only 10% sometimes or occasionally work from policies from the data governance board (over 40% of respondents said they did not have a data governance board).

On a scale of zero to six (zero representing no interest whatsoever and six representing active involvement), almost half of the respondents listed their CXOs with and interest level of zero.

Over a quarter listed their CxOs with an interest level of one, and around 10% had an interest level of two. That means that less than 10% of a few executives (the CSO, CCO and COO) had interest at level six. That's pretty pitiful.

So, what do we do?  I'd love your thoughts!