Data Governance: Not Exactly a 'No-Brainer'

A point of emphasis that emerged during last week's Toronto Financial Information Summit is that any data governance plan or effort must be business driven.

"The business will tell you what needs to be fixed," said Peter McGuinness, an enterprise process management and analytics executive at CIBC. "The business will tell you what it uses, how much is needed to fix it and how it may actually fund that. If it's driven by technology and operations, or from a bottom-up perspective, it's doomed to failure."

McGuinness advised attendees not to lean toward data governance as a solution, but rather toward analytics governance or information management governance, tying in how data will be used.

The keynote speaker in Toronto, Mary Kotch, global chief information officer at Validus, a re-insurance company, urged attendees to press for innovation in their operations, as she is doing in her current role. Kotch added that she is campaigning with colleagues to get the firm's brightest IT people moved to the business management side of the company. "This means IT gives up some resources," she said. "My business partners want to move that layer of having to call IT, and instead create a project plan in a business-friendly way."

Paul Childerhose, director of data governance for exposure and capital analysis, at Scotiabank, described how data governance planning should play out in a collaborative manner. "Everyone is looking at the data and they really take offense at someone coming in and telling them how to do things differently," he said. "Immerse yourself in the operations. Come at it from a pure level."

The provenance and sourcing of data, and the pursuit of data quality, are important to data governance planning, as noted in a past column. Hearing these recent comments and conversations highlighted the importance of simply getting the right people, the right management and the right environment all together at once, to do effective data governance.

That seems like the proverbial "no-brainer," but it's probably not as simple as just stating what should happen. Looking again at the question asked here before the summit, about whether changes are needed in a firm's culture, its business or its IT infrastructure, the answer indeed appears to be all three of those.