Database Reference
In-Depth Information
such a system. MDM can play a pivotal role in the governance of Big Data
initiatives, providing a governed, single version of the truth that's annotated
by valuable insights from Big Data initiatives.
We noted earlier that many organizations don't acknowledge the need to
govern a lot of the new data that their Big Data initiatives bring into the enter-
prise, and therefore don't properly account for it in the planning phase of
their Big Data projects. We thought that it would be interesting to share with
you the two reasons for this that we hear over and over again.
The first one is: “Big Data started as a research initiative. The concept of
governance wasn't required—we used a small data set and operated within
a trusted environment. When the business approved the project and we started
to work on it, that's when we realized this was no different than any other
enterprise IT project—it needed to be governed.” That's an example of not
thinking about your new data in the same way as your old data, and then
trying to retrofit a governance plan that's going to end up being more costly
and complex than it needed to be.
The second most common answer we get is: “We were building a lot of
new capabilities into our Big Data project—analytics, models, and so on—so
we just figured we could build governance if we needed it. Write some code
to enforce security here, write some other code to match data there, and in
the end, it crept up on us that governance isn't a tactical issue, and that
addressing it in a one-off manner was very costly.”
Are you starting to see a theme here? Those organizations that don't plan
for the governance of their Big Data systems from the start end up falling
behind and must face significant additional costs to retrofit governance into
their ecosystems.
But those that leverage their existing information integration processes
and governance technologies are the ones who will derive the most benefit
from new Big Data analytics technologies in a secure, trusted, and compliant
fashion.
Competing on Information and Analytics
Many organizations pursue Big Data analytics to find breakthrough insights
that give them a competitive advantage. They are competing on analytics.
But can you really compete on analytics alone? After all, what does analytics
