Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
to develop strategies to address the problems and move the state of the data
forward over time.
What are IT's Responsibilities?
Although data ownership is a business responsibility, there are several critical
things that the information technology staff must provide. Following are a few
examples of the IT staff's responsibilities:
Provide the technical environment to store data.
Ensure that the business rules are implemented correctly.
Assist the data owner in researching data-related problems.
Help design solutions to correct data problems and prevent them from
happening again.
These are only a representative sample of responsibilities. The technical staff
should be considered the group to provide the mechanism of support for all
information management activities.
Challenges with Data Ownership
Over time, business rules and processing logic have become embedded into
application systems. This ensures that the rules are applied in a consistent
manner and that the people running the system are no longer required to
know them at a detailed level. A negative side-effect of this is that institutional
knowledge about why business is done that way, or sometimes even how
business is done, is lost. The people who really understood it have retired,
left the organization, or may have been promoted to very high levels and are
not easily accessible. The people who are now responsible for this work know
what steps need to happen to get the output that is needed on a periodic basis,
but there is no understanding of the underlying business purpose. It can feel
like being stonewalled in these cases, as you cannot get straight answers.
Acknowledge this situation if it exists, and give those people leeway. How
could they possibly be expected to know the answers to detailed questions?
This does not mean that you should just accept the status quo; it means that
it will take longer to figure things out. Depending on how old the application
system is and how much the business has changed, it may be better to just
redefine what you want done. You can unravel the code and spreadsheets
to see what is actually done, although it is unlikely that you can figure out
why. Be prepared to discover that things are not what everyone thought.
Some calculations or processes may not be done using the current business
rules. Even worse, the rules may be applied in only some cases, while others
