What is it with organizations that don't
value data governance? Perhaps they're not asking the right, penetrating
questions.
I like these questions, courtesy of IBM's Chris Evans: “Imagine you need to submit financial earnings such as 10Q or a 10K that needs to be filed with the SEC with a decentralized governance model. Do you know how much longer and how difficult this would be? Before these reports can be consolidated for submission, you would need to ask the simple questions about the data such as what does it mean? Does it mean the same thing for all business units or just for a few? What are the translation rules to get everything consolidated so that they can mean the same thing?”
When you use data standards, these questions evaporate. Evans is polite in referring to the “decentralized governance model” for a situation we might equally call “data anarchy”. The only way organizations get away with anarchy is by not asking these types of question.
Evans has another question: “While companies are now becoming global companies, data needs to be more synchronized and to start, data needs standards, but at what level?” Organizations in the insurance domain have a ready answer, thanks to the investment made by the community in the ACORD standards. IBM
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