The Analytics Revolution

CHAPTER 6 Governance and Privacy

Just as a government can stifle citizens with overzealous creation and enforcement of rules, so can an organization stifle its employees with overzealous governance policies. However, having no rules can lead to a state of anarchy and mayhem that is just as bad as a state of oppressive rules. Governance is an undue burden only when an organization makes it so.

Like many people, I dislike the word “governance” and I cringe when someone tells me they want to discuss it. However, there really isn't a more appropriate word for what we must discuss next. Many readers may be questioning whether to even read this chapter. After all, governance is dry, boring, and tactical, right? Not necessarily. Most people would agree that operational analytics require some sort of ongoing quality assurance and reliability validation. In addition, there must be guidelines in place to send processing to the appropriate place within the unified analytics environment, define security protocols, and establish privacy policies. All of those topics fall under the umbrella of governance.

This chapter focuses on how to govern the unified analytics environment defined in Chapter 5 to allow users and applications the access and resources required to succeed with making analytics operational. We talk about how the governance policies that enable the analysis of big data and making analytics operational are different from traditional approaches. We also lay out some of the implications ...