Self-Service Data Analytics and Governance for Managers

CHAPTER 3Why Governance Is Essential and the Self-Service Data Analytics Governance Gap

As described in Chapters 1 and 2, organizations are leveraging analytics and automation tools today more than ever. The adoption of technological innovation is driven by the promises of more stable and efficient processing, an attractive projected return on investment (ROI), and for the capture of competitive edge by early adopters. Even while analytics solutions confer obvious benefits to finance, operations, and accounting functions that have historically relied on manual spreadsheet processing to supplement system features, functionality, interoperability, and reporting gaps, they also introduce a new set of risks to the organization.

Readers must not doubt that data analytics tooling is quickly becoming indispensable to publicly traded companies and high-performing organizations, more generally. Not only do they perform core processing activities, but they are relied upon to inform management decision-making. Further, for accounting and finance functions in particular, their output is likely to be highly regulated. While the benefits of “small” automation are clear and ever-growing as more use cases are discovered, supporting governance foundations have not closely followed; most organizations that have embraced digital transformation may be operating under fragmented legacy governance structures that have failed to keep pace with the growth in data analytics tooling and the changing ...