White Paper. An Overview of the Kalido Data Governance Director Operationalizing Data Governance Programs Through Data Policy Management

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1 White Paper An Overview of the Kalido Data Governance Director Operationalizing Data Governance Programs Through Data Policy Management

2 Managing Data as an Enterprise Asset By setting up a structure of accountability through data policy definition, implementation and enforcement, organizations can improve data policy compliance and attack the root cause of bad data. Data is the life blood of business. Without good data, business processes cannot operate efficiently. Sound business decisions rely on good data. Regulations around data are growing increasingly restrictive, and the risk of non-compliance is enormous. The root cause of bad data is the lack of clear accountability, making it difficult to assign responsibility. As a result, most approaches to date address the symptoms of the problem at a massive cost rather than taking aim at the root cause. Data Governance delivers the how of managing data as an enterprise asset. By setting up a structure of accountability through data policy definition, implementation and enforcement, organizations can improve data policy compliance and attack the root cause of bad data. Leading companies have begun the adoption of Data Governance as a core competence and have dedicated internal organizations to implement their Data Governance programs. The Kalido Data Governance Director Organizations with formal, established data governance programs have typically defined standard processes for the lifecycle of data policies and begun the process of measuring compliance to implemented policies. Unfortunately, these processes are highly manual and range in sophistication based on the scope and maturity of the data governance organization. At its least mature state, policies are simply documents that are approved, communicated and stored in a central document repository. At its most mature state, the documented policies have been turned into executable rules that have been implemented through a combination of data quality tools, SQL and rule engines with the results being displayed via a dashboard. Without enabling technology, Data Governance becomes labor intensive, costly and ineffective and therefore not sustainable. Software automation improves the scale and efficiency of Data Governance and enables business people, providers and consumers of data to collaborate directly. Technology provides a foundation to operationalize Data Governance by making it a day-to-day practice. Without the right technology, Data Governance programs will struggle to deliver business value. The Kalido Data Governance Director operationalizes data governance programs through data policy management. There are various types of data policies that can cover the overall scope of data governance. These policy types can be categorized into Model-, Quality-, Security- and Lifecycle- related policies. The initial release of the Kalido Data Governance Director will focus on data quality policies. Manage Data Policies The Kalido Data Governance Director provides a common, pervasive, more visible policy layer on top of existing data repositories such as operational systems, data warehouses, master data hubs and integration infrastructure. This 2

3 is accomplished by allowing a combination of business and technical resources to collaboratively define data policies in the context of current state business process, data, system and organization models, aligning them with business objectives. Kalido Data Governance Director leverages existing investments in data models, process models and the system landscape to produce a Unified Business Model that will form the basis for defining a data policy. The next key capability is the ability to define the organizational scope that will complete the framework that enables a data policy to be defined. Scope is fundamental to solving this problem as different consumers of the same dataset rightfully have different requirements. It is therefore not possible to effectively define a measurable policy without knowing the requirements of the consumer of the data. Organizational scope considers three dimensions: Geopolitical Functional Line of Business The combination of these three allow the appropriate context to be applied to all data policies and the activities that surround the creation, change management, communication, implementation, issue tracking and remediation of data policies. Policies are defined using business terminology by the owner of a consuming process. All providers of data to this process are alerted to the proposed data policy and required to comply with the data policy once they agree to an SLA specifying the scope, quality and timeliness of the data. Operationalize Data Governance Processes The process of authoring a new data policy is usually one of the defined processes for a Data Governance organization. These standard processes are implemented within Kalido Data Governance Director as a sequence of activities and tasks. The application orchestrates not just the process of data policy creation but all governance processes, including change management, communication, implementation, issue tracking and remediation. Data Governance organizations have the capability to define all of their processes and the people involved in each step of the process, thereby allowing the application to drive and track the activities and tasks needed to accomplish the goals of Data Governance. As a result, Data Governance organizations can track the progress of each individual Data Governance initiative and also consolidate them for a view of how much of the overall landscape is under governance as well as activities that are impeding the Governance process. These processes can be templated, allowing similar processes to be defined more efficiently but still catering for nuances due to organization. Templates are a core capability in the Kalido Data Governance Director, enabling consistency in large distributed environments as well as to accelerate the deployment of governance initiatives. Templates can form the framework for the Unified Business Model, policies or a set of activities to accomplish a goal. 3

4 Templates could therefore be industry model frameworks (both data & process) that the organizations actual models are associated with. A corporate center of an excellence might recommend a corporate template that could be modified to cater for the specific needs of a line of business or functional area. The key activity after the acceptance of a new policy would be to translate the business language data policy into a set of executable rules. With the focus of the initial release on data quality, these rules will be quality related. The Kalido Data Governance Director will orchestrate the execution of these rules and gather the metrics returned post rule execution. Organizations that have already implemented solutions to gather data quality metrics can load these metrics along with a definition of the existing rules into Kalido Data Governance Director so as to ensure the reuse of existing assets. With all initiatives being tracked down to the individual task level the efficiency of individual members of the Data Governance organization as well as the overall effectiveness of the Data Governance program can be tracked at a point in time or trended via an operational dashboard. Measure and Improve Data Policy Compliance The metrics that are captured by these rules will enable data stewards to monitor, measure and report compliance with data policies over time in order to drive continuous improvement. Active monitoring of compliance allows the appropriate stakeholders to be alerted in a timely fashion to all data policy violations. The Kalido Data Governance Director will also allow the wider enterprise that is not explicitly involved in actively managing data to not just browse the data policies relevant to their organizational scope but will allow this wider audience to raise context sensitive issues against data violations that they encounter. The context is set by the organizational scope of the person as well as trying to associate the issue with an appropriate element of the Unified Business Model. These issues result in the appropriate people in the organization being alerted and each issue can be tracked to resolution. Certain issues as well as policy violations can be systemic and require some form of remediation. The Kalido Data Governance Director would allow the Data Governance team to gather appropriate metrics, including duration, invasiveness, resource requirements and system offline time about each remediation option. This provides the ability to choose the remediation effort that most closely balances cost, benefit and risk using a data-driven decision process. The progress of the remediation effort will be tracked as an explicit Data Governance initiative. Benefits The Kalido Data Governance Manager provides direct benefits to the Data Governance Program, the Business as well as IT. Data Governance Program Benefits Data Governance Programs are more efficient: Improve data stewards productivity through automation Streamline disparate Data Governance processes Scale the initiative to cover broader scope Data Governance Programs are more effective: Ensure adherence to prescribed Data Governance processes Promote awareness and transparency to all stakeholders Improve compliance by instituting accountability using metrics Manage performance of the program to continuously improve it 4 Data Governance Programs are more sustainable: Gain and sustain support of line of business Ensure program creates provable business value

5 Business Benefits Business will have increased operational efficiency resulting from: Reduce rework and manual workaround due to inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent data that feed into business processes Simplify processes by explicitly catering for the data quality needs of each process More efficient processes allow the business to focus on value creation by: Improve quality and agility of business decisions without compromising efficiency Reduce integration burdens for mergers and acquisitions Mitigate poor data as a barrier to business transformation And the organization will be able to reduce overall risk through: Improved transparency Documented and auditable processes to auditors and regulators Reduced security, privacy, compliance and legal risks IT Benefits The business focus of the application allows there to be a closer business-it alignment which allows the organization to: Business benefits include increased operational efficiency, value creation and reduced overall risk. Address chronic data quality problem at the root cause Put responsibility for data content in the rightful hands and provide direct and day-to-day business participation Minimize fire-drill caused by bad data Ensure that data initiatives are aligned and prioritized with respect to business objectives with measurable outcome The open architecture allows the organizations existing investments to be leveraged by reusing models and tools. There is also a significant reduction in future costs due to the reduced need for data cleanup. 5

6 Kalido Data Governance Director is a first of its kind application developed specifically to put policies and procedures into action and accelerate the implementation and adoption of data governance programs. Summary It is widely accepted that the three cornerstones of data governance are people, process and technology. To date, the right technology has not been available. Kalido Data Governance Director is a first of its kind application developed specifically to put policies and procedures into action and accelerate the implementation and adoption of data governance programs. Kalido Data Governance Director achieves these objectives by: Aligning data policies with business objectives and engaging business as a partner and data steward Orchestrating those processes across a distributed organization Managing roles and responsibilities Providing accessible and clearly defined policies Demonstrating return-on-investment Promoting a sustainable and extensible data governance program If you re ready to jump start your data governance initiative or improve the performance of an existing data governance program, Kalido Data Governance Director is the right solution. About Kalido Kalido is the leading provider of business-driven data governance software. Kalido enables companies to manage data as a shared enterprise asset by supporting the business process of data management. Kalido software has been deployed at more than 300 locations in over 100 countries, including 20 percent of the world s most profitable companies as determined by Fortune Magazine. More information about Kalido can be found at: 6 6

7 Contact Information US Tel: Eur Tel: +44 (0) or visit our website at Copyright 2010 Kalido. All rights reserved. Kalido, the Kalido logo and Kalido s product names are trademarks of Kalido. References to other companies and their products use trademarks owned by the respective companies and are for reference purpose only. WP-DGD06102