Navigating the Organization to Ensure Data Governance - Data Governance: Creating Value from Information Assets - page 40

data governance successful should exist. This vision should be shared and
be understood by all.
Data Quality
The final principle of successful data governance is data quality. It is criti-
cal for an organization's knowledge workers and management to be able
to trust the data source. IT needs to know all sources of data, its complete-
ness, quality, and lineage for both operational and regulatory purposes.
However, in reality, it is a difficult task to accomplish. Few companies can
absolutely trust their data. Organizations deal with it by implementing
human middleware to fix and control data quality. Currently, the market
offers a plethora of data quality tools and methodologies to address
poor-quality data.
CHALLENGES OF DATA GOVERNANCE
The effort required to achieve data governance often seems far higher than
the perceived benefits. This is because organizations may be more focused
on the direct costs of data management in running their businesses and
have overlooked the downstream impact of poor-quality information
and missed opportunities. They may have data management initiatives in
place, but not data governance strategies. Again, organizations may have a
data governance policy and structure, but may not focus on the execution
of these data policies. These could be some of the reasons they may not be
seeing the return on their efforts in data governance.
Despite data policies and procedures in organizations, they are often
unable to readily account for the various systems linkages and data-sharing
arrangements, or provide an accurate inventory of the data assets, data
exchanged, where data is hosted, or the sensitivity levels of the data. Data
governance helps organizations effectively audit and manage data access
control, identify and classify data owners, and oversee entitlement and
authorization processes for their sensitive data. An effective data gover-
nance approach is often the solution to these problems.
With the explosion of mobile technology, records are now stored across
platforms, including the cloud. This makes data security, safeguarding pro-
prietary information, and keeping the integrity of information intact one